Looker Studio: Speed up your dashboards

Have you been in meeting or presentation and wanted to be able to share insight on Looker Studio but were hesitant because you never know how long you will be waiting your dashboard to render?

If the answer to to that question is yes.

Have you tried the Looker Studio extract data connector?

It's one of the free connectors from Looker/Google which allows you to take a snapshot of your data and use that in your dashboard charts rather than the direct partner connector. The extract data connector allows to to schedule your data source to refresh daily, weekly or monthly. 

Use this free connector to take a snapshot of your data.

There are 2 excellent technical reasons for using this data connector. 

1. Improves the page (dashboard) load speed
   
2. It doesn't keep consuming your daily Looker Studio API call allowance 

What does this mean?

Each time you open a dashboard the underlying data sources that are populating your charts and tables has to complete an API request back to the original source. If the content of your data source has not been filtered via a parameter it will have to complete multiple API requests to bring the data into the Looker Studio cache from the source system. This takes time and depending upon the complexity of the API request can consume a lot of time and/or resource. Looker studio automatically times out after 6 minutes. So you have to have designed your data source to complete the request in this time.

The partner connector provider will have done as much development as they can to optimise the connector to ensure data loading completes quickly and efficiently (Sometimes it will require the use of parameters from the Looker User when building the data source to reduce the size of the API request)  

If you want to learn more and see how to use the extract data connector watch this video below and see how it's done. (In this example we are using the Stripe Payments connector. During the video we see the difference in speed from direct connector loading at 2 minutes 58 seconds versus less than 1 second for an extract.

 

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