Connect to Google Cloud Spanner

The Cloud Spanner connector lets you access data from Google Cloud Spanner within Looker Studio. Cloud Spanner is an enterprise-grade, globally-distributed, and strongly consistent database service built for the cloud specifically to combine the benefits of relational database structure with non-relational horizontal scale.

Cloud Spanner is a paid service. Learn more about pricing.

How to connect to Google Cloud Spanner

A Looker Studio data source can connect to Cloud Spanner databases using Google Standard SQL query syntax.

To connect

  1. Sign in to Looker Studio.
  2. On the Looker Studio home page, in the top left, click The Create icon.Create, and then select Data Source.
  3. Select the Cloud Spanner connector.
  4. If asked, authorize Looker Studio to access your data.
  5. On the left, set up the connection to your database. You'll need to provide:
    1. Project ID
    2. Instance ID (see the Notes section to find out how to list your instance configurations).
    3. Database ID
  6. In the text field, enter your SQL query.
  7. In the upper right, click CONNECT.

In a moment, the data source fields list page appears. Click CREATE REPORT to start visualizing your data.

Notes

List instance configurations

The Cloud SDK command-line tool lets you interact with Cloud Spanner. For example, the following command lists the regional and multi-region instance configurations that are available for your project:


gcloud spanner instance-configs list

Regional configurations distribute data in a single region, while multi-region configurations distribute data geographically across multiple regions. Learn more about Instances.

Data types

Looker Studio maps your database's built-in data types to a unified set of data types. If Looker Studio encounters a column in your table or query of an unsupported type, it won't create a field for that column.

Limits of the Spanner connector

  • The response size from Spanner is limited to 10 MB. See the Spanner Limits article for other limits.
  • Column headers (field names) must use ASCII characters only. Non-ASCII characters aren't supported.

Troubleshooting

See the Looker Studio troubleshooting guide for a list of common error messages and steps to resolve them.