Create Reports from OData Services in Looker Studio

Looker Studio, formerly known as Google Data Studio, empowers users to craft customized reports featuring data visualizations that can be shared with clients while reflecting your brand identity. When combined with CData Connect Cloud, you gain immediate cloud-to-cloud access to OData services to create visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article provides step-by-step instructions on establishing a virtual database for OData and generating reports from OData services within Looker Studio.

CData Connect Cloud offers a seamless cloud-to-cloud interface tailored for OData, making it straightforward to construct reports directly from live OData services within Looker Studio without the need for data replication. As you create visualizations, Looker Studio generates queries to retrieve data. With its inherent optimized data processing capabilities, CData Connect Cloud efficiently channels all supported query operations, including filters, JOINs, and more, directly to OData. This leverages server-side processing to swiftly provide the requested OData services.

Configure OData Connectivity for Looker Studio

Connectivity to OData from Looker Studio is made possible through CData Connect Cloud. To work with OData services from Looker Studio, we start by creating and configuring a OData connection.

1. Log into Connect Cloud, click Connections and click Add Connection
2. Select "OData" from the Add Connection panel
3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to OData.

   The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, must be set to valid OData user credentials. In addition, you will need to specify a URL to a valid OData server organization root or OData services file.

4. Click Create & Test
5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add OData Connection page and update the User-based permissions.

With the connection configured, you are ready to connect to OData services from Looker Studio.

Visualize Live OData Services from Looker Studio

The steps below outline connecting to CData Connect Cloud from Looker Studio to create a new OData data source and build a simple visualization from the data.

1. Log into Looker Studio, click data sources, create a new data source, and choose CData Connect Cloud Connector.
2. Click Authorize and allow access to your Google account.
3. Click Authorize to authenticate with your CData Connect Cloud instance
4. In the CData Connect Cloud Connector in Looker Studio select a Connection (e.g. OData1) and click Next
5. Select a Table (e.g. Orders) or use a Custom Query and click Connect to continue
6. If needed, modify columns, click Create Report, and add the data source to the report.
7. Select a visualization style and add it to the report.
8. Select Dimensions and Measures to customize your visualization.

Live Access to OData Services from Cloud Applications

Now you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to live OData services from your Looker Studio workbook. You can create more data sources and new visualizations, build reports, and more — all without replicating OData services.

Try CData Connect Cloud and get real-time data access to 100+ SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources directly from your cloud applications.