Agreed. LookML is to SQL what SASS is to CSS: not necessary but it sure makes certain things easier.
I’m not connected with Looker in any way, and they are pretty expensive, but the product is awesome.
I’m not connected with Looker in any way, and they are pretty expensive, but the product is awesome.
Product analytics is one of these complex use-cases. You can't really find a convenient way to run funnel and retention queries in Looker, it only focuses on slicing/dicing the data with their models. Moreover, it has a high learning curve even for the enterprise and there are definitely better ways to approach this problem.
Disclaimer: We're actually working on a LookML alternative based on Jsonnet that will be a better alternative for event modeling. This is how it looks like: https://github.com/rakam-io/recipes. We recently published a VSCode extension for it: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rakam.ra...