Usage

view: view_name {  measure:field_name{ ...}}

Definition

Themeasure parameter declares a new measure (aggregation) and specifies a name for that measure.

There are several criteria for a measure's name:

• It must be unique within any given view.
• It must consist of charactersa throughz (no capital letters),0 through9, or_.
• It must start with a letter.

There are many types of measures, as discussed further on theMeasure types documentation page.

Subparameters formeasure

See theField parameters reference page for a list of subparameters that are available for LookML fields.

Examples

Create measures namedproduct_count andtotal_value in a view namedproducts:

view: products {  measure: product_count {    type: count  }  measure: total_value {    sql: ${value} ;;    type: sum  }}

Things to know

Measures in joined views

To have measures (aggregations) come through joins, you must define primary keys in all the views that are involved in the join.

You can do this by adding theprimary_key parameter to the primary key field definition in each view:

dimension: id {  type: number  primary_key: yes}

To correctly handle joined measures, Looker relies on you specifying a primary key where the values are completely unique, non-NULL values. If your data does not contain a primary key, consider whether theconcatenation of several fields would result in a primary key of completely unique, non-NULL values. If your primary key is not unique or contains NULL values and your query includes data that reveals those issues, then Looker returns an error as described in theError: Non-Unique value/primary key (or sql_distinct_key), value overflow or collision when computing sum Best Practices page.

Measures based on other measures

It is possible to define a measure that is based on another measure. The new measure must be oftype: number to avoid nested-aggregation errors. See the documentation ontype: number for measures for an example and explanation.