Looker Builds Next-Generation Business Intelligence Tool

What does business intelligence (BI) mean in the age of Big Data? According to Looker, it's all about a new generation of solutions that are built from the ground up to analyze huge amounts of information effectively and in real time. That's the vision behind the company's new BI platform, announced this week.

The product, called the Looker Datafold Engine, introduces a "next generation approach to data discovery," according to the company, by doing a number of things differently from legacy BI tools designed for the age of small data. Innovations in Looker's BI engine include:

• Providing a modeling language, called LookML, for interacting with data. The language is especially useful, Looker says, because it provides reusability across different data measures and dimensions.
• Using persistent derived tables, a feature that is part of LookML, to structure data. In non-data scientist speak, that means the tool can accept data in a variety of different forms, and reorganize it as needed, on an ongoing basis, in order to provide the best means of analyzing the information. That's different from traditional approaches to data analysis, which generally rely on splitting data into fixed data sets that make granular and on-the-fly analysis more difficult.
• The ability to work equally well with small subsets of data or a very large array of information, and to switch seamlessly between these different points of focus. Persistent derived tables are an important part of that functionality.

The Looker Datafold Engine works in the backend, and can serve as a general-purpose data server for delivering data to any application. It supports data platforms including HP Vertica, Amazon Redshift, Aster, Postgres and MySQL.

Looker is certainly not the only vendor trying to bring data analytics tools up to speed with the explosive growth of Big Data infrastructure in the enterprise. The decline of traditional data technologies such as MySQL, and its replacement with new approaches in the form of NoSQL databases, is part of the same story. But whichever new strategies end up winning out, it is clear that the next generation of BI and data analytics tools is on the way, and the old road is rapidly fading.