Encrypting network traffic

It is a best practice to encrypt network traffic between the Looker application and your database. Consider one of the options that are described on theEnabling secure database access documentation page.

To learn more about using SSL encryption, see theMicrosoft documentation.

Users and security

First, connect to themaster database on your server with your server admin login:

CREATELOGINlookerWITHPASSWORD='<strong_password>';

Connect to your Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics database and create a database user:

CREATEUSERlookerFORLOGINlooker;

Looker must be authorized to detect and stop currently running queries, which requires the following permissions:

ALTERANYCONNECTIONVIEWSERVERSTATE

To grant these permissions, run the following:

GRANTCONTROLONDATABASE::userDatabaseTOlooker;

Depending on the Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics tier being used, you may also need to explicitly grant theVIEW DATABASE STATE permission.

To grantVIEW DATABASE STATE permission, run the following:

GRANTVIEWDATABASESTATETOlooker;

Temp schema setup

Create a schema owned by the Looker user:

CREATESCHEMAlooker_scratchAUTHORIZATIONlooker;

Creating the Looker connection to your database

In theAdmin section of Looker, selectConnections, and then clickAdd Connection.

Fill out the connection details. The majority of the settings are common to most database dialects. See theConnecting Looker to your database documentation page for information. The following fields have additional information that applies to Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics:

• Dialect: SelectMicrosoft Azure Synapse Analytics.

• Remote Host andPort: Enter the hostname and port (the default port is 1433).

  If you need to specify a non-default port other than 1433 and your database requires the use of a comma instead of a colon, you can adduseCommaHostPortSeparator=true in theAdditional JDBC parameters field further down in the connection settings, which will allow you to use a comma in theRemote Host:Port field. For example:

  jdbc:sqlserver://hostname,1434

To verify that the connection is successful, clickTest. See theTesting database connectivity documentation page for troubleshooting information.

To save these settings, clickConnect.

Feature support

For Looker to support some features, your database dialect must also support them.

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics supports the following features as of Looker 26.2: