Looker

The proxy can be enabled on an individual user/group basis, allowing you to quickly validate the performance and results of the proxy before rolling out to the entire company.

As outlined in the Looker documentation, it is possible to have a user attribute defining properties and parameters of a connection, and this is exactly what we will do with the rootUrl parameter. The connection’s JDBC parameters can be set up using Liquid templating syntax instead of being hard coded.

For this setup, please follow these steps:

1. Go to https://<your-looker-instance>.cloud.looker.com/admin/user_attributes and create a new user attribute named alv_proxy_url with the settings below. The default value of this attribute should be https://bigquery.googleapis.com. Hit save.

   
2. You will see two new tabs 'Group Values' and 'User Values'. Select a user or group with which you want to test the proxy and set a new value to your proxy url in the format https://<your-org>.opti.alvin.ai . You can find your proxy URL here or by asking an Alvin representative. Make sure that the URL has the https protocol. For more insight on how to set up users and groups, check out the official Looker documentation. Once set it will look like the screenshot below.

1. Go to the Admin > Connection and edit your connection at https://<your-looker-instance>/admin/next/connections/<connection-id>/edit. Set the Additional JDCB Parameters field like this: rootUrl={{ _user_attributes['alv_proxy_url'] }} This connection will now use the user attribute alv_proxy_url you created in the previous step for the chosen user/group.

1. After making this change, you need to reauthenticate the connection. Go to Database Settings and upload your Service Account Certificate or add your OAuth credentials. Test the connection is working and then hit save. NB: This Looker service account should not be confused with the service account that you have added to Alvin. The Looker service account is the service account that already exists in your GCP environment that is used to access BigQuery in this Looker database connection. If anything is unclear here, or you are unsure of how this works, please do reach out to Alvin prior to making changes.

   
2. Once you've done some initial testing and are happy with the performance, you can then repeat step 2, now by going to the tab 'Group Values', selecting All Users and setting the value as your proxy url: https://<your-org>.opti.alvin.ai