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Comment by phunge | Hacker News Reader

They mention that it was originally paired with Druid. The data volume that Druid excels at (and that AirBnB must have) is orders of magnitude larger than what Tableau&Looker do well with. It's probably just built for bigger-than-SQL OLAP usecases.

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It's worth distinguishing between the tools that leave the data in your data warehouse (Caravel, Periscope, Mode, Looker (where I work)), and those that have their own data stores (Good Data, Qlikview, etc.) Tableau can connect directly to your datastore, but it's happier if it can operate on data that's stored locally in-memory.

Anyway, the ones where bring your own database can scale as far as the database can bring you.

Note that Tableau doesn't play well with Presto which Airbnb uses extensively. No possibility of using the "live mode"

Not arguing that Airbnb should use Looker, but fwiw, Looker (where I work) does in fact connect to Presto fine.

Looker scales with plenty of data for us at Snapchat, it's more about the underlying database than the BI tool.

Note that this user used to work at Looker.

yep i did.

Looker performance comes from the underlying storage of data. You can store massive amounts of data on say a Red Shift cluster and still be performant. Most visualization tools that i know are directly tied to storage tier in terms of performance.

I don't think Looker supports Druid.

That's correct. We (I work at Looker) are written to leverage the analytical capabilities of SQL. So we support all kinds of SQL implementations, from totally standard (PG, MySQL, MS) to MPPs (Redshift, BigQuery) to SQL-on-Hadoop (Hive, Impala, Presto, Spark).

But the JDBC -> Druid connectors that exist look pretty janky. So if someone builds a stable connector, I suspect we'd support it. But for the moment, no Druid.

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