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.
To learn more about using SSL encryption, see the Microsoft documentation.
Users and security
First, connect to the master database on your server with your server admin login:
CREATE LOGIN looker
WITH PASSWORD = '<strong_password>';
Connect to your Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics database and create a database user:
CREATE USER looker FOR LOGIN looker;
Looker must be authorized to detect and stop currently running queries, which requires the following permissions:
ALTER ANY CONNECTION
VIEW SERVER STATE
To grant these permissions, run the following:
GRANT CONTROL ON DATABASE::userDatabase TO looker;
Depending on the Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics tier being used, you may also need to explicitly grant the
VIEW DATABASE STATEpermission.
To grant VIEW DATABASE STATE permission, run the following:
GRANT VIEW DATABASE STATE TO looker;
Temp schema setup
Create a schema owned by the Looker user:
CREATE SCHEMA looker_scratch AUTHORIZATION looker;
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. The following fields have additional information that applies to Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics:
- Dialect: Select Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics.
Remote Host and Port: Enter the hostname and port (the default port is 1433).
If you need to specify a non-default port other than 1433 and your database requires the use of a comma instead of a colon, you can add
useCommaHostPortSeparator=truein the Additional JDBC parameters field further down in the connection settings, which will allow you to use a comma in the Remote Host:Port field. For example:jdbc:sqlserver://hostname,1434
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.
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics 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 |