To connect Looker to Amazon Aurora MySQL, follow the instructions found on the documentation page for connecting to Amazon RDS for MySQL.
In addition to the steps in the Amazon RDS instructions, Amazon Aurora may need further setup, depending on your configuration. If you have a redirected read-only endpoint for Amazon Aurora, or if you want to use persistent derived tables (PDTs), see the following sections.
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.
Alternate failover and load balancing modes
Amazon Aurora MySQL can be configured to use alternate failover and load balancing modes to choose the appropriate JDBC connection behavior you want. Check the linked documentation to see how these alternative parameters change the behavior.
You can set the lookerFailover parameter in the Additional JDBC parameters field to control these modes.
The options can be used to change the JDBC string as follows:
lookerFailover=false:jdbc:mysql:hostname...lookerFailover=sequential:jdbc:mysql:sequential:hostname...- You can do the same with
lookerFailover=loadbalance,lookerFailover=replication, andlookerFailover=aurora
- You can do the same with
- If
lookerFailoveris not included, the default behavior is:jdbc:mysql:aurora:hostname... - If
cluster-rois in the hostname, the default behavior is:jdbc:mysql:hostname...
Configuring Amazon Aurora MySQL for PDTs
In order to use persistent derived tables (PDTs) with Aurora, you must use MySQL replication, not Amazon Aurora's default replication, which is read-only. You must set the read_only parameter to 0 to make the MySQL replica writable, as described in our documentation on RDS and temporary tables.
If you don't want to grant write access to the database, you can copy and paste the derived table SQL into the sql_table_name parameter of a view file as shown here. This creates a subquery that is used at query time:
view: my_name {
sql_table_name: (sql_of_derived_table_goes_here) ;;
}
For more details on Aurora replication, see the AWS documentation.
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.
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.
Amazon Aurora MySQL supports the following features as of Looker 25.10:
| Feature | Supported? |
|---|---|
| Support level | Supported |
| Looker (Google Cloud core) | |
| Symmetric aggregates | |
| Derived tables | |
| Persistent SQL derived tables | |
| Persistent native derived tables | |
| Stable views | |
| Query killing | |
| SQL-based pivots | |
| Timezones | |
| SSL | |
| Subtotals | |
| JDBC additional params | |
| Case sensitive | |
| Location type | |
| List type | |
| Percentile | |
| Distinct percentile | |
| SQL Runner Show Processes | |
| SQL Runner Describe Table | |
| SQL Runner Show Indexes | |
| SQL Runner Select 10 | |
| SQL Runner Count | |
| SQL Explain | |
| OAuth 2.0 credentials | |
| Context comments | |
| Connection pooling | |
| HLL sketches | |
| Aggregate awareness | |
| Incremental PDTs | |
| Milliseconds | |
| Microseconds | |
| Materialized views | |
| Period-over-period measures | |
| Approximate count distinct |