Building a free Looker alternative with dbt + Metriql + Google Data Studio

[buremba]

We’ll build a Looker alternative using dbt + Metriql + Google Data Studio and write a blog post to explain how you built this stack and to showcase it's +/-’s over Looker.

Steps

1. Fork https://github.com/metriql/metriql-public-demo and copy the models & seeds from dbt sample project: https://github.com/dbt-labs/jaffle_shop
2. Load this data into a BigQuery dataset.
3. Define metrics relevant to the dataset using Metriql. You should make use of Metriql’s relations and data studio semantic types.
4. Use Metriql’s integration with GDS and sync your metrics to GDS and start running ad-hoc analysis.
5. Prepare a GDS dashboard that you can link in your blog later on.
6. Write a tutorial like a blog to guide those who would like to use this free stack over LookML + Looker including screenshots and the Github repository

Tooling

• You can use Github's VSCode (example: https://github.dev/metriql/metriql-public-demo) and mention it as an alternative to Looker IDE.
• If you fork the public demo, it comes with Github Actions that run dbt as part of the continuous integration process. (https://github.com/metriql/metriql-public-demo/actions) You can mention Github Actions as an alternative to Looker's internal scheduler.
• We use CI and CD to deploy the data models to Heroku automatically when the data models change. (Bonus: testing data models as part of the CI process. Talk to @buremba about it before publishing the post)

Things to mention

• Looker has everything embedded into the product but the BI world is now decentralized. People use dbt for transformation, VSCode as an IDE, or their preferred BI tool to analyze the data. The missing layer was the metrics layer for all the BI tools, Metriql taps on this problem.
• Metriql is LookML for all the BI & data tools. Looker's strongest suit is LookML, there are better visualization products such as Tableau.
• Looker has APIs but it's not a metrics store because you can't integrate it with other BI tools.
• Looker is expensive