5.x Release Notes

Preparing for Releases

We occasionally retire features. You can plan for this with the Legacy Features End-of-life Schedule.

In the release notes, you may see some special symbols:

  • Items marked with a indicate changes to existing functionality that may require your attention as you update, such as features being retired.

  • Items marked with a indicate a Looker Labs feature that must be enabled by an admin on the Labs page.

  • Items marked with a indicate changes to system configurations that may impact your ability to run the new release.

Looker 5.24 2018-09-23

LookML and Development

  • New API endpoints for Git management. The experimental API 3.1 now contains the following endpoints: all_git_branches, git_branch, create_git, update_git, find_git_branch, delete_git_branch.

Scheduling and Downloading

  • Download Merged Results as CSVs. It is now possible to download dashboards containing merged results queries as CSVs.

Dialects

  • BigQuery Standard SQL. Added support for DATETIME and NUMERIC data types.
  • Amazon Athena. Updated the driver to version 2.0.5.

General Tweaks & Bug Fixes

Security

  • Fixed a security issue where users could potentially change ownership of other users' dashboards. #### Dashboards, Visualizations, and Explore
  • Series layering order is now determined automatically, rather than going right to left when the Enhanced Visualizations Labs feature is enabled and multiple series types are selected.
  • Fixed a bug where long-running queries prevented dashboards from loading.
  • Fixed a bug where using custom fields on Merged Results queries hid the Explore From Here button.
  • Fixed a bug where some dashboard tiles showed the following error: Unexpected token � in JSON at position 14.
  • Continued improvements to beta Enhanced Visualizations and Enhanced Renderer Labs features. #### Content Management and Discoverability
  • Fixed a bug where embed users could not navigate backward when saving a Look.
  • Fixed a bug where restoring a dashboard from the trash did not also restore Looks. #### Platform and Administration
  • Fixed a bug causing some general instance performance issues for Powered by Looker instances. #### Scheduling and Downloading
  • Fixed a bug where dashboards were rendered wrong in emails due to Gmail UI redesign.
  • Fixed a bug where user-specific time zones were not applied to exported query results. #### LookML and Development
  • Stopped generating superfluous joins for empty filters.
  • Continued improvements to the experimental Custom Fields Labs feature. #### Action Hub
  • Made some small UI changes to the Admin menu for the Looker Action Hub.

Looker 5.22 2018-08-26

Dashboards and Visualizations

  • Merged Results Improvements:
    • Experimental Custom Fields can now be used in Merged Results.
    • Merged Results are now available in embedded dashboards.
  • Beta Enhanced Renderer. Introduced Enhanced Rendering designed to be used in conjunction with the beta Enhanced Visualizations feature. Learn more about customer-hosted setup.

LookML and Development

  • Code quality options. Added a third level of code quality requirements. Looker admins can now allow developers to commit LookML code with warnings, but not with unfixed errors, in the LookML validator. Learn more.
  • Git setup performance enhancements. Back-end enhancements to the Git setup process make Git integration faster and more performant.
  • Disabled Legacy feature: The Allow the access_filter_fields parameter Legacy feature has been disabled, but will remain available until Looker 6.0 if needed. Please use user-attribute-based access filters for controls going forward. Learn more.
  • Introduced a new Legacy feature: Native derived tables convert dates and yesno values to strings by default. Learn more.

Dialects

  • Athena. Updated to Athena driver 2.0.5 and introduced support for arrays in Athena.

General Tweaks and Bug Fixes

Dashboards, Visualizations, and Explore

  • Continued improvements to the Enhanced Visualizations Labs feature.
  • Fixed a bug where pivots occasionally caused blank visualizations on the Explore.
  • Fixed a bug where some Looks were unable to load more than 10,000 rows. #### Scheduling and Downloading
  • Fixed a bug where schedules occasionally failed due to node communication errors.
  • Fixed a bug where filters on fields that had been removed caused the scheduler UI to break.
  • Fixed a bug where some schedules to S3 buckets were failing. #### Platform and Administration
  • Fixed a bug where string type user attributes did not properly escape -. #### LookML and Development
  • Addressed an issue where switching between files in the IDE was sluggish.
  • Fixed a bug where some distance dimensions incorrectly calculated a distance of 0.00.
  • Unnecessary include statements are now generated commented in view files.
  • Fixed a bug where the Content Validator sometimes reloads with boxes checked.
  • Continued improvements to experimental Custom Fields.
  • Fixed a bug where custom dimensions could be used to query filter-only fields. Looks and dashboards with these fields may cause an error message.
  • Fixed a bug where always_join was not used in suggestions query. #### Content Management and Discoverability
  • Fixed a bug where the Spaces sidebar was not scrolling properly.
  • Fixed a bug where restoring a dashboard from the Trash did not restore associated Looks.
  • Added breadcrumbs to the Spaces page. #### Dialects
  • Fixed a bug where number type dimensions did not recognize the decimal data type in Athena.
  • The LookML generator now double quotes column references in IBM Db2. #### Security
  • Removed stack trace exposure in the event of low-level errors.

Looker 5.20 2018-07-29

General Tweaks and Bug Fixes

Action Hub

  • Added clearer error messaging in the Action Hub section of the scheduler modal.

LookML and Development

  • Added the ability to revert uncommitted changes in the event of a merge conflict.
  • Improved performance when switching between LookML files in the IDE.
  • Fixed a bug where null values in the milliseconds timeframe produced errors.
  • Fixed a bug where the LookML validator showed errors and warnings from previous run.
  • Fixed a bug where direct links to SQL Runner queries occasionally did not load SQL.
  • Fixed a bug where using suggest_dimension without suggest_explore caused an error.

Platform and Administration

  • Added the option to require authentication on the project deploy webhook. Learn more.
  • Added the see_system_activity permission to allow non-admin users to access the Usage Panel. Learn more.
  • Added the ability to specify a domain whitelist on hidden user attribute fields.
  • Improved error messaging when hitting git authentication issues.

Dialects

  • Added support for querying array type fields in Athena.
  • Added PDT support for MemSQL and IBM Netezza.
  • Enhanced the LookML generator for Dremio to wrap table and schema referenced in double quotes.

Dashboards and Visualizations

  • Continued improvements to experimental Enhanced Visualizations.
  • Improved performance for moving tiles on dashboards.
  • Continued improvements to experimental Custom Visualizations.
    • Added asynchronous loading to visualizations for improved performance.
    • Fixed a bug where color palettes were not exported as hex values.
    • Fixed a bug where some visualizations did not render correctly in an iframe.
  • Fixed a bug where the reference line label text box in the visualization settings menu only accepted a single character.
  • Fixed a bug where toggling the visualization configuration menu in the UI created whitespace in the visualization.

Scheduling and Downloading

  • Fixed a bug where embed users needed the save_content permissions in order to create a schedule.
  • Fixed a bug where email schedules rendered incorrectly in Outlook 2013.

Content Management and Discoverability

  • Made the grid or table selection in user spaces persistent across sessions.

  • Fixed a bug where merged results did not work correctly in homepage thumbnails.

Looker 5.18 2018-06-28

Platform and Administration

  • New Passwords page in Admin Panel. New Admin menu allows for additional control over password requirements for Looker users. Learn more.
  • New default password requirements. New and reset passwords will be subject to the following requirements: minimum length 7 characters, at least one uppercase and one lowercase letter, one numeric character, and one special character.
  • Looker now adds contextual information as a SQL comment to every query.
  • Looker now uses Java to manage certificate verification rather than maintaining its own distinct CA bundle. Learn more. ### Dashboards and Visualizations
  • Improvements to Merged Results.
    • Merged Results no longer requires a special user group or Labs setting.
    • Dashboard-level filters can now be applied to Merged Results tiles.
    • It is now possible to validate Merged Results in the Content Validator.
  • Enhanced Visualizations in Labs. The Labs toggle enables a new visualization architecture. Cartesian charts may look a little cleaner with this beta Labs feature enabled.
  • Beta API changes.
    • The dashboard route has been updated to allow for filtering on Merged Results tiles. The dashboard_elements object now has a listen array rather than key-value pairs. Learn more. ### LookML and Development
  • Git HTTPS configuration. Git connections can now be configured over HTTPS with a username and password. Learn more.
  • New PDT DDL customization. Developers can now customize PDT DDL statements with LookML parameters create_process and sql_create. Learn more about create_process. Learn more about sql_create.
  • Project Import public remote repositories. Looker Blocks and other public projects can now be imported and kept up to date as the public repository is updated. Learn more.
  • New LookML warnings. Introduced two new warnings to alert developers about problematic states that the LookML Validator did not previously recognize.
    • Added a warning when model-level parameters are overridden by an include statement with different model-level parameters.
    • Added a warning when the include statement requests a LookML dashboard that can't be found. Most likely triggered by include: *.dashboard when no LookML dashboards are present. ### Dialects
  • Google Cloud SQL. Enabled support for Persistent Derived Tables. ### General Tweaks and Bug Fixes ####Dashboards, Visualizations, and Explore
  • Fixed a bug where some queries returned No Results in the Explore, when they should have returned a SQL error.
  • Fixed a bug where updating to Looker 5.16 caused some visualization settings to change.
  • Fixed a bug where conditional formatting could not be applied to some fields.
  • Fixed a bug where dashboard tiles remained blank instead of displaying an error when the backing explore had been deleted.
  • Fixed a bug where the series editor in the visualization panel did not listen to hide in visualization.
  • Fixed a bug where Explore from Here was not available on LookML dashboards. ####Security
  • Added encryption to account setup and reset tokens.
  • Fixed a bug where some dashboard filters defaulted to default values from other dashboards. ####Scheduling and Downloading
  • Fixed a bug where dates rendered as ##### in some .xls downloads.
  • Fixed a bug where downloading CSV data from an embed preview showed a 500 error. ####Platform and Administration
  • Fixed a bug where adding LDAP user with incorrectly mapped attributes never fully created Looker user. ####LookML and Development
  • Fixed a bug where a warning was generated by LookML generated by Looker.
  • Fixed a bug where symmetric aggregates were not recomputing with the addition of a custom field.
  • Non-Unique Primary Key error now cached with the query that produced it.
  • Fixed a bug where Liquid was unrenderable in a Postgres list_agg.
  • Fixed a bug where a git branch with / in its name could not be deleted from the Looker UI.
  • Fixed a bug where LookML generator occasionally created self-joins.
  • Fixed a bug that showed a ViewNotFound error when using suggest_dimension.
  • Improved error handling for fields named yes and no. ####Dialects

  • Fixed a bug where Presto tables with - in the name were not escaped correctly in generated SQL.

    Looker 5.16 2018-06-03

Action Hub

  • Introduced Actions for Marketo. Learn more.
  • Introduced Actions for Google Cloud Storage. Learn more.
  • Introduced new Segment, Amazon S3, and Digital Ocean Storage functionality. Learn more.

Scheduling and Downloading

  • Added JSON Detail Streaming Support. It is now possible to stream content as JSON, allowing for delivery of larger result sets.

LookML and Development

  • Refreshed the Manage Projects page to make it easier to add and configure LookML projects.
    • The Delete Project button is now accessible through the LookML Project Settings menu rather than through Manage Projects.
  • Introduced a LookML validator warning when a field name and an alias name have the potential to cause a collision.
  • Added the ability to create a read-only clone of a project from a public repository.

Security

  • Fixed an issue that could result in unencrypted files written to a tmp directory in cases of very large Excel exports. Access to these files required system-level access to the Looker host, which is logged and monitored, and is limited to specific Looker personnel.
  • Users are no longer able to edit Looks and dashboard tiles that are based on models they do not have the Explore permissions for.
  • Fixed potential HTML injection vulnerabilities in experimental Login Page Message, group name as rendered in Recent Activity page, and certain User Attributes fields in the admin panel.
  • Fixed Reverse Tabnapping Vulnerability with anchor tags in fields where markdown is permitted.

Dialects

  • Microsoft Azure PostgreSQL. Introduced support for Microsoft Azure PostgreSQL.
  • Google BigQuery Standard SQL. Improved performance and ability to scale queries using Symmetric Aggregates.
  • Snowflake. Enhanced the LookML generator to better preserve character casing and properly identify all timestamp types.
  • Teradata. The Looker .jar no longer includes the Teradata driver. Admins of customer-hosted Looker deployments will have to add a driver to their Looker machine. Learn more.
  • Improved month name SQL implementation for Hive and Spark to be less verbose and more performant.

Content Management and Discoverability

  • Improvements to the way content is displayed in Spaces.
    • Looks and dashboards display as thumbnails in Spaces.
    • Copy, edit, delete, and rename content from thumbnails.
    • View content metadata in Spaces.

General Tweaks and Bug Fixes

Dashboards, Visualizations, and Explore

  • Added measure type: sum to experimental custom fields.
  • Fixed a bug with autocomplete functionality in custom fields.
  • Fixed a bug where the run button was hidden in iframes where filter values contained too many characters.
  • Fixed an issue where all_dashboards API call returned deleted dashboards.
  • Fixed a bug where Table Calculations and Custom Fields did not work with aliased fields.

Scheduling and Downloading

  • Added additional endpoints to API 3.1.

Platform and Administration