How to load data from Looker to Clickhouse

Learn how to use Airbyte to synchronize your Looker data into Clickhouse within minutes.

Try Airbyte Cloud

Get a demo

Building your pipeline or Using Airbyte

Airbyte is the only open solution empowering data teams to meet all their growing custom business demands in the new AI era.

Building in-house pipelines

Bespoke pipelines are:

Inconsistent and inaccurate data
Laborious and expensive
Brittle and inflexible

Furthermore, you will need to build and maintain Y x Z pipelines with Y sources and Z destinations to cover all your needs.

After Airbyte

Airbyte connections are:

Reliable and accurate
Extensible and scalable for all your needs
Deployed and governed your way

All your pipelines in minutes, however custom they are, thanks to Airbyte’s connector marketplace and Connector Builder.

Start syncing with Airbyte in 3 easy steps within 10 minutes

Set up a Looker connector in Airbyte

Connect to Looker or one of 400+ pre-built or 10,000+ custom connectors through simple account authentication.

Set up Clickhouse for your extracted Looker data

Select Clickhouse where you want to import data from your Looker source to. You can also choose other cloud data warehouses, databases, data lakes, vector databases, or any other supported Airbyte destinations.

Configure the Looker to Clickhouse in Airbyte

This includes selecting the data you want to extract - streams and columns -, the sync frequency, where in the destination you want that data to be loaded.

Try Airbyte Cloud

Take a virtual tour

Check out our interactive demo and our how-to videos to learn how you can sync data from any source to any destination.

Demo video of Airbyte Cloud

Demo video of AI Connector Builder

Talk to our team

Old Automated Content

TL;DR

set up Looker as a source connector (using Auth, or usually an API key)
set up Clickhouse as a destination connector
define which data you want to transfer and how frequently

You can choose to self-host the pipeline using Airbyte Open Source or have it managed for you with Airbyte Cloud.

This tutorial’s purpose is to show you how.

What is Looker

Looker is a Google-Cloud-based enterprise platform that provides information and insights to help move businesses forward. Looker reveals data in clear and understandable formats that enable companies to build data applications and create data experiences tailored specifically to their own organization. Looker’s capabilities for data applications, business intelligence, and embedded analytics make it helpful for anyone requiring data to perform their job—from data analysts and data scientists to business executives and partners.

What is Clickhouse

ClickHouse is an open-source, column-oriented OLAP database management system that allows users to generate analytical reports using SQL queries. Also offered as a secure and scalable service in the cloud, ClickHouse Cloud allows anyone to effortlessly take advantage of efficient real time analytical processing.

Integrate Looker with Clickhouse in minutes

Try for free now

Prerequisites

A Looker account to transfer your customer data automatically from.
A Clickhouse account.
An active Airbyte Cloud account, or you can also choose to use Airbyte Open Source locally. You can follow the instructions to set up Airbyte on your system using docker-compose.

Airbyte is an open-source data integration platform that consolidates and streamlines the process of extracting and loading data from multiple data sources to data warehouses. It offers pre-built connectors, including Looker and Clickhouse, for seamless data migration.

When using Airbyte to move data from Looker to Clickhouse, it extracts data from Looker using the source connector, converts it into a format Clickhouse can ingest using the provided schema, and then loads it into Clickhouse via the destination connector. This allows businesses to leverage their Looker data for advanced analytics and insights within Clickhouse, simplifying the ETL process and saving significant time and resources.

Step 1: Set up Looker as a source connector

1. Open Looker and navigate to the Admin panel.

2. Click on "Connections" and then "New Connection".

3. Select "Airbyte" as the type of connection.

4. Enter a name for the connection and the URL for the Airbyte instance.

5. In the "Authentication" section, select "OAuth2" as the authentication method.

6. Enter the Client ID and Client Secret provided by Airbyte.

7. In the "Advanced" section, set the "API Version" to "v1".

8. Click "Test" to ensure the connection is successful.

9. Save the connection and navigate to the "Explore" panel.

10. Select the Airbyte connection as the data source and choose the relevant tables to explore.

Note: It is important to ensure that the Airbyte instance is properly configured and the necessary connectors are installed before attempting to connect to Looker. Additionally, the specific steps for adding credentials may vary depending on the version of Looker being used.

Step 2: Set up Clickhouse as a destination connector

Step 3: Set up a connection to sync your Looker data to Clickhouse

Once you've successfully connected Looker as a data source and Clickhouse as a destination in Airbyte, you can set up a data pipeline between them with the following steps:

Create a new connection: On the Airbyte dashboard, navigate to the 'Connections' tab and click the '+ New Connection' button.
Choose your source: Select Looker from the dropdown list of your configured sources.
Select your destination: Choose Clickhouse from the dropdown list of your configured destinations.
Configure your sync: Define the frequency of your data syncs based on your business needs. Airbyte allows both manual and automatic scheduling for your data refreshes.
Select the data to sync: Choose the specific Looker objects you want to import data from towards Clickhouse. You can sync all data or select specific tables and fields.
Select the sync mode for your streams: Choose between full refreshes or incremental syncs (with deduplication if you want), and this for all streams or at the stream level. Incremental is only available for streams that have a primary cursor.
Test your connection: Click the 'Test Connection' button to make sure that your setup works. If the connection test is successful, save your configuration.
Start the sync: If the test passes, click 'Set Up Connection'. Airbyte will start moving data from Looker to Clickhouse according to your settings.

Remember, Airbyte keeps your data in sync at the frequency you determine, ensuring your Clickhouse data warehouse is always up-to-date with your Looker data.

Use Cases to transfer your Looker data to Clickhouse

Integrating data from Looker to Clickhouse provides several benefits. Here are a few use cases:

Advanced Analytics: Clickhouse’s powerful data processing capabilities enable you to perform complex queries and data analysis on your Looker data, extracting insights that wouldn't be possible within Looker alone.
Data Consolidation: If you're using multiple other sources along with Looker, syncing to Clickhouse allows you to centralize your data for a holistic view of your operations, and to set up a change data capture process so you never have any discrepancies in your data again.
Historical Data Analysis: Looker has limits on historical data. Syncing data to Clickhouse allows for long-term data retention and analysis of historical trends over time.
Data Security and Compliance: Clickhouse provides robust data security features. Syncing Looker data to Clickhouse ensures your data is secured and allows for advanced data governance and compliance management.
Scalability: Clickhouse can handle large volumes of data without affecting performance, providing an ideal solution for growing businesses with expanding Looker data.
Data Science and Machine Learning: By having Looker data in Clickhouse, you can apply machine learning models to your data for predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and more.
Reporting and Visualization: While Looker provides reporting tools, data visualization tools like Tableau, PowerBI, Looker (Google Data Studio) can connect to Clickhouse, providing more advanced business intelligence options. If you have a Looker table that needs to be converted to a Clickhouse table, Airbyte can do that automatically.

Wrapping Up

To summarize, this tutorial has shown you how to:

Configure a Looker account as an Airbyte data source connector.
Configure Clickhouse as a data destination connector.
Create an Airbyte data pipeline that will automatically be moving data directly from Looker to Clickhouse after you set a schedule

With Airbyte, creating data pipelines take minutes, and the data integration possibilities are endless. Airbyte supports the largest catalog of API tools, databases, and files, among other sources. Airbyte's connectors are open-source, so you can add any custom objects to the connector, or even build a new connector from scratch without any local dev environment or any data engineer within 10 minutes with the no-code connector builder.

We look forward to seeing you make use of it! We invite you to join the conversation on our community Slack Channel, or sign up for our newsletter. You should also check out other Airbyte tutorials, and Airbyte’s content hub!

What should you do next?

Hope you enjoyed the reading. Here are the 3 ways we can help you in your data journey:

Easily address your data movement needs with Airbyte Cloud

Take the first step towards extensible data movement infrastructure that will give a ton of time back to your data team.

Get started with Airbyte for free

Talk to a data infrastructure expert

Get a free consultation with an Airbyte expert to significantly improve your data movement infrastructure.

Talk to sales

Improve your data infrastructure knowledge

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter and get the community’s new enlightening content along with Airbyte’s progress in their mission to solve data integration once and for all.

Subscribe to newsletter

What sets Airbyte Apart

Modern GenAI Workflows

Streamline AI workflows with Airbyte: load unstructured data into vector stores like Pinecone, Weaviate, and Milvus. Supports RAG transformations with LangChain chunking and embeddings from OpenAI, Cohere, etc., all in one operation.

Move Large Volumes, Fast

Quickly get up and running with a 5-minute setup that supports both incremental and full refreshes, for databases of any size.

An Extensible Open-Source Standard

More than 1,000 developers contribute to Airbyte’s connectors, different interfaces (UI, API, Terraform Provider, Python Library), and integrations with the rest of the stack. Airbyte’s Connector Builder lets you edit or add new connectors in minutes.

Full Control & Security

Airbyte secures your data with cloud-hosted, self-hosted or hybrid deployment options. Single Sign-On (SSO) and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) ensure only authorized users have access with the right permissions. Airbyte acts as a HIPAA conduit and supports compliance with CCPA, GDPR, and SOC2.

Fully Featured & Integrated

Airbyte automates schema evolution for seamless data flow, and utilizes efficient Change Data Capture (CDC) for real-time updates. Select only the columns you need, and leverage our dbt integration for powerful data transformations.

Enterprise Support with SLAs

Airbyte Self-Managed Enterprise comes with dedicated support and guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs), ensuring that your data movement infrastructure remains reliable and performant, and expert assistance is available when needed.

What our users say

Jean-Mathieu Saponaro

Data & Analytics Senior Eng Manager

"The intake layer of Datadog’s self-serve analytics platform is largely built on Airbyte.Airbyte’s ease of use and extensibility allowed any team in the company to push their data into the platform - without assistance from the data team!"

Learn more

Chase Zieman

Chief Data Officer

“Airbyte helped us accelerate our progress by years, compared to our competitors. We don’t need to worry about connectors and focus on creating value for our users instead of building infrastructure. That’s priceless. The time and energy saved allows us to disrupt and grow faster.”

Learn more

Alexis Weill

Data Lead

“We chose Airbyte for its ease of use, its pricing scalability and its absence of vendor lock-in. Having a lean team makes them our top criteria. The value of being able to scale and execute at a high level by maximizing resources is immense”

Learn more

Sync with Airbyte

Step 1: Set up Looker as a source connector

1. Open Looker and navigate to the Admin panel.

2. Click on "Connections" and then "New Connection".

3. Select "Airbyte" as the type of connection.

4. Enter a name for the connection and the URL for the Airbyte instance.

5. In the "Authentication" section, select "OAuth2" as the authentication method.

6. Enter the Client ID and Client Secret provided by Airbyte.

7. In the "Advanced" section, set the "API Version" to "v1".

8. Click "Test" to ensure the connection is successful.

9. Save the connection and navigate to the "Explore" panel.

10. Select the Airbyte connection as the data source and choose the relevant tables to explore.

Step 2: Set up Clickhouse as a destination connector

Step 3: Set up a connection to sync your Looker data to Clickhouse

Once you've successfully connected Looker as a data source and Clickhouse as a destination in Airbyte, you can set up a data pipeline between them with the following steps:

Create a new connection: On the Airbyte dashboard, navigate to the 'Connections' tab and click the '+ New Connection' button.
Choose your source: Select Looker from the dropdown list of your configured sources.
Select your destination: Choose Clickhouse from the dropdown list of your configured destinations.
Configure your sync: Define the frequency of your data syncs based on your business needs. Airbyte allows both manual and automatic scheduling for your data refreshes.
Select the data to sync: Choose the specific Looker objects you want to import data from towards Clickhouse. You can sync all data or select specific tables and fields.
Select the sync mode for your streams: Choose between full refreshes or incremental syncs (with deduplication if you want), and this for all streams or at the stream level. Incremental is only available for streams that have a primary cursor.
Test your connection: Click the 'Test Connection' button to make sure that your setup works. If the connection test is successful, save your configuration.
Start the sync: If the test passes, click 'Set Up Connection'. Airbyte will start moving data from Looker to Clickhouse according to your settings.

Remember, Airbyte keeps your data in sync at the frequency you determine, ensuring your Clickhouse data warehouse is always up-to-date with your Looker data.

How to Sync Looker to Clickhouse Manually

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4:

Step 5:

Step 6:

Step 7:

Step 8:

FAQs

What is ETL?

ETL, an acronym for Extract, Transform, Load, is a vital data integration process. It involves extracting data from diverse sources, transforming it into a usable format, and loading it into a database, data warehouse or data lake. This process enables meaningful data analysis, enhancing business intelligence.

What is Looker?

What data can you extract from Looker?

Looker's API provides access to a wide range of data categories, including:

1. User and account data: This includes information about users and their accounts, such as user IDs, email addresses, and account settings.

2. Query and report data: Looker's API allows users to retrieve data from queries and reports, including metadata about the queries and reports themselves.

3. Dashboard and visualization data: Users can access data about dashboards and visualizations, including the layout and configuration of these elements.

4. Data model and schema data: Looker's API provides access to information about the data model and schema, including tables, fields, and relationships between them.

5. Data access and permissions data: Users can retrieve information about data access and permissions, including which users have access to which data and what level of access they have.

6. Integration and extension data: Looker's API allows users to integrate and extend Looker with other tools and platforms, such as custom applications and third-party services.

Overall, Looker's API provides a comprehensive set of data categories that enable users to access and manipulate data in a variety of ways.

How do I transfer data from Looker?

This can be done by building a data pipeline manually, usually a Python script (you can leverage a tool as Apache Airflow for this). This process can take more than a full week of development. Or it can be done in minutes on Airbyte in three easy steps:
1. Set up Looker to ClickHouse as a source connector (using Auth, or usually an API key)
2. Choose a destination (more than 50 available destination databases, data warehouses or lakes) to sync data too and set it up as a destination connector
3. Define which data you want to transfer from Looker to ClickHouse and how frequently
You can choose to self-host the pipeline using Airbyte Open Source or have it managed for you with Airbyte Cloud.

What is ELT?

ELT, standing for Extract, Load, Transform, is a modern take on the traditional ETL data integration process. In ELT, data is first extracted from various sources, loaded directly into a data warehouse, and then transformed. This approach enhances data processing speed, analytical flexibility and autonomy.

Difference between ETL and ELT?

ETL and ELT are critical data integration strategies with key differences. ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) transforms data before loading, ideal for structured data. In contrast, ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) loads data before transformation, perfect for processing large, diverse data sets in modern data warehouses. ELT is becoming the new standard as it offers a lot more flexibility and autonomy to data analysts.

Back to all tutorials

Databases

Product Analytics

How to load data from Looker to Clickhouse

Learn how to use Airbyte to synchronize your Looker data into Clickhouse within minutes.

Try Airbyte Cloud free

Deploy Airbyte Open Source

Step 2: Setup Clickhouse

Step 3: Setup a connection Use Cases Wrapping Up

Example H2

Example H3

Sync data between Looker and Clickhouse

Get your data syncing in minutes

Try Airbyte free

TL;DR

set up Looker as a source connector (using Auth, or usually an API key)
set up Clickhouse as a destination connector
define which data you want to transfer and how frequently

You can choose to self-host the pipeline using Airbyte Open Source or have it managed for you with Airbyte Cloud.

This tutorial’s purpose is to show you how.

What is Looker

What is Clickhouse

Integrate Looker with Clickhouse in minutes

Try for free now

Prerequisites

A Looker account to transfer your customer data automatically from.
A Clickhouse account.
An active Airbyte Cloud account, or you can also choose to use Airbyte Open Source locally. You can follow the instructions to set up Airbyte on your system using docker-compose.

Step 1: Set up Looker as a source connector

1. Open Looker and navigate to the Admin panel.

2. Click on "Connections" and then "New Connection".

3. Select "Airbyte" as the type of connection.

4. Enter a name for the connection and the URL for the Airbyte instance.

5. In the "Authentication" section, select "OAuth2" as the authentication method.

6. Enter the Client ID and Client Secret provided by Airbyte.

7. In the "Advanced" section, set the "API Version" to "v1".

8. Click "Test" to ensure the connection is successful.

9. Save the connection and navigate to the "Explore" panel.

10. Select the Airbyte connection as the data source and choose the relevant tables to explore.

Step 2: Set up Clickhouse as a destination connector

Step 3: Set up a connection to sync your Looker data to Clickhouse

Once you've successfully connected Looker as a data source and Clickhouse as a destination in Airbyte, you can set up a data pipeline between them with the following steps:

Create a new connection: On the Airbyte dashboard, navigate to the 'Connections' tab and click the '+ New Connection' button.
Choose your source: Select Looker from the dropdown list of your configured sources.
Select your destination: Choose Clickhouse from the dropdown list of your configured destinations.
Configure your sync: Define the frequency of your data syncs based on your business needs. Airbyte allows both manual and automatic scheduling for your data refreshes.
Select the data to sync: Choose the specific Looker objects you want to import data from towards Clickhouse. You can sync all data or select specific tables and fields.
Select the sync mode for your streams: Choose between full refreshes or incremental syncs (with deduplication if you want), and this for all streams or at the stream level. Incremental is only available for streams that have a primary cursor.
Test your connection: Click the 'Test Connection' button to make sure that your setup works. If the connection test is successful, save your configuration.
Start the sync: If the test passes, click 'Set Up Connection'. Airbyte will start moving data from Looker to Clickhouse according to your settings.

Remember, Airbyte keeps your data in sync at the frequency you determine, ensuring your Clickhouse data warehouse is always up-to-date with your Looker data.

Use Cases to transfer your Looker data to Clickhouse

Integrating data from Looker to Clickhouse provides several benefits. Here are a few use cases:

Advanced Analytics: Clickhouse’s powerful data processing capabilities enable you to perform complex queries and data analysis on your Looker data, extracting insights that wouldn't be possible within Looker alone.
Data Consolidation: If you're using multiple other sources along with Looker, syncing to Clickhouse allows you to centralize your data for a holistic view of your operations, and to set up a change data capture process so you never have any discrepancies in your data again.
Historical Data Analysis: Looker has limits on historical data. Syncing data to Clickhouse allows for long-term data retention and analysis of historical trends over time.
Data Security and Compliance: Clickhouse provides robust data security features. Syncing Looker data to Clickhouse ensures your data is secured and allows for advanced data governance and compliance management.
Scalability: Clickhouse can handle large volumes of data without affecting performance, providing an ideal solution for growing businesses with expanding Looker data.
Data Science and Machine Learning: By having Looker data in Clickhouse, you can apply machine learning models to your data for predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and more.
Reporting and Visualization: While Looker provides reporting tools, data visualization tools like Tableau, PowerBI, Looker (Google Data Studio) can connect to Clickhouse, providing more advanced business intelligence options. If you have a Looker table that needs to be converted to a Clickhouse table, Airbyte can do that automatically.