Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift 2.1+, and Amazon Redshift Serverless 2.1+

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Looker supports connections with Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift 2.1+, and Amazon Redshift Serverless 2.1+.

• For Amazon Redshift connections, Looker uses the PostgreSQL JDBC driver.

• For Amazon Redshift 2.1+ and Amazon Redshift Serverless 2.1+ connections, Looker uses the Redshift JDBC driver.

Optionally, you can also access data from Amazon Redshift using Amazon Redshift Spectrum to access data stored in S3.

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.

If you're interested in using SSL encryption, see the Amazon Redshift documentation on configuring security options for connections.

Users and security

First, create your Looker user. Change password to a unique, secure password:

CREATE USER looker WITH PASSWORD 'password';

See the Amazon Redshift documentation for information about password constraints.

Next, grant the appropriate privileges:

GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA public TO looker;
GRANT SELECT ON TABLE public.table1 TO looker;
GRANT SELECT ON TABLE public.table2 TO looker;
...
GRANT SELECT ON TABLE public.tableN TO looker;

To give Looker access to the information schema data that it needs to generate LookML and that it needs for the SQL Runner side bar, run the following commands:

GRANT SELECT ON TABLE information_schema.tables TO looker;
GRANT SELECT ON TABLE information_schema.columns TO looker;

If you want to GRANT SELECT on all of your tables to the looker user, execute this query:

GRANT SELECT ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO looker;

For acceptable Redshift performance, it is necessary to set the proper distribution and sort keys. See the Redshift documentation for details.

Temp schema setup

While logged in to your Redshift database as an admin user, run:

CREATE SCHEMA looker_scratch AUTHORIZATION looker;

If the looker_scratch schema is already created or has bad permissions:

ALTER SCHEMA looker_scratch OWNER TO looker;

Setting the search_path

Finally, you should set an appropriate search_path, which Looker SQL Runner uses to retrieve certain metadata from your database. Assuming that you have created a user called looker, and a temp schema called looker_scratch, the command is as follows:

ALTER USER looker SET search_path TO '$user',looker_scratch,schema_of_interest,public;
                                                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                                                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                                             include a comma-separated list of
                                            all schemas you'll use with Looker

Optionally accessing data in S3 using Amazon Redshift Spectrum

You can take full advantage of Amazon Redshift Spectrum's performance from within Looker.

Spectrum significantly extends the functionality and ease of use for Redshift by letting users access data stored in S3, without having to load it into Redshift first. You can even join S3 data to data stored in Redshift, and the Redshift optimizer will take care of maximizing your query performance, optimizing both the S3 and Redshift portions of your query. For information on setting up access using Amazon Spectrum, see the Community post on Using Amazon Redshift's new Spectrum Feature.

Creating the Looker connection to your database

After completing the database configuration, you can connect to the database by performing the following steps:

1. Click the Looker Main menu icon menu and select Admin, if the Admin menu isn't already displayed. (You may have to click the back arrow if the Explore or Develop menu is displayed.)
2. In the Admin menu, select Connections, and then click Add Connection.
3. From the Dialect drop-down menu, select Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift 2.1+, or Amazon Redshift Serverless 2.1+.
4. 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.
5. To verify that the connection is successful, click Test. See the Testing database connectivity documentation page for troubleshooting information.
6. To save these settings, click Connect.

Feature support

For Looker to support some features, your database dialect must also support them. The following sections show the feature support for Amazon Redshift dialects:

• Amazon Redshift
• Amazon Redshift 2.1+
• Amazon Redshift Serverless 2.1+

Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift supports the following features as of Looker 25.8:

Amazon Redshift 2.1+

Amazon Redshift 2.1+ supports the following features as of Looker 25.8:

Amazon Redshift Serverless 2.1+

Amazon Redshift Serverless 2.1+ supports the following features as of Looker 25.8: