Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Encrypting network traffic

It is a best practice to encrypt network traffic between the Looker application and your database. Consider one of the options described on the Enabling secure database access documentation page.

To learn more about using SSL encryption, see the Microsoft documentation.

Users and security

First, connect to the master database on your server with your server admin login:

CREATE LOGIN looker
WITH PASSWORD = '<strong_password>';

Connect to your Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics database and create a database user:

CREATE USER looker FOR LOGIN looker;

Looker must be authorized to detect and stop currently running queries, which requires the following permissions:

ALTER ANY CONNECTION
VIEW SERVER STATE

To grant these permissions, run the following:

GRANT CONTROL ON DATABASE::userDatabase TO looker;

Depending on the Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics tier being used, you may also need to explicitly grant the VIEW DATABASE STATE permission.

To grant VIEW DATABASE STATE permission, run the following:

GRANT VIEW DATABASE STATE TO looker;

Temp schema setup

Create a schema owned by the Looker user:

CREATE SCHEMA looker_scratch AUTHORIZATION looker;

Creating the Looker connection to your database

In the Admin section of Looker, select Connections, and then click Add Connection.

Fill out the connection details. The majority of the settings are common to most database dialects. See the Connecting Looker to your database documentation page for information. The following fields have additional information that applies to Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics:

  • Dialect: Select Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics.

  • Remote Host and Port: Enter the hostname and port (the default port is 1433).

    If you need to specify a non-default port other than 1433 and your database requires the use of a comma instead of a colon, you can add useCommaHostPortSeparator=true in the Additional JDBC parameters field further down in the connection settings, which will allow you to use a comma in the Remote Host:Port field. For example:

    jdbc:sqlserver://hostname,1434

To verify that the connection is successful, click Test. See the Testing database connectivity documentation page for troubleshooting information.

To save these settings, click Connect.

Feature support

For Looker to support some features, your database dialect must also support them.

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics supports the following features as of Looker 24.18:

Feature Supported?
Support Level
Supported
Looker (Google Cloud core)
Yes
Symmetric Aggregates
Yes
Derived Tables
Yes
Persistent SQL Derived Tables
Yes
Persistent Native Derived Tables
Yes
Stable Views
Yes
Query Killing
Yes
SQL-based Pivots
Yes
Timezones
Yes
SSL
Yes
Subtotals
Yes
JDBC Additional Params
Yes
Case Sensitive
No
Location Type
Yes
List Type
No
Percentile
No
Distinct Percentile
No
SQL Runner Show Processes
No
SQL Runner Describe Table
Yes
SQL Runner Show Indexes
No
SQL Runner Select 10
Yes
SQL Runner Count
Yes
SQL Explain
Yes
Oauth Credentials
No
Context Comments
Yes
Connection Pooling
No
HLL Sketches
No
Aggregate Awareness
Yes
Incremental PDTs
Yes
Milliseconds
Yes
Microseconds
Yes
Materialized Views
No
Approximate Count Distinct
No