Rittman Analytics Blog
Latest thoughts on data analytics, customer insights, and industry trends
Making Agentic Analytics More Accurate using Anthropic’s Agentic Data Stack and the Wire Framework
Anthropic published a blog article last week, “How Anthropic enables self-service data analytics with Claude”, describing an approach to one of the hardest problems in enterprise AI: how do you…
Google Next 2026: What’s New for Looker, BigQuery, Data Platforms and Agentic Analytics
Lydia, Olivier Dupuis and I were representing Rittman Analytics at Google Next 2026 in Las Vegas this last week, and it certainly was an event at Google-scale. In a masterpiece…
Introducing the Wire Framework: The “Secret Sauce” Behind Our AI-Augmented Analytics Project…
If you’ve tried asking Claude or ChatGPT to generate a dbt model or a fact table definition for you, it’s impressive how fast it can produce syntactically-correct code. But building…
So, Just How Relevant is Multi-Touch Attribution to Marketers in 2026?
If you’re running marketing for a B2C business, it’s somewhat of an understatement to say you’ve probably noticed that attribution has become significantly harder over the past few years. Between…
One Person Many Roles: Designing a Unified Person Dimension in Google BigQuery
When building our internal data warehouse, we quickly noticed that people and companies sit at the centre of most business processes and that the same person or company often plays…
Why We’ve Tried to Replace Data Analytics Developers Every Decade Since 1974
(This article was inspired by Stephan Schwab’s excellent piece “Why We’ve Tried to Replace Developers Every Decade Since 1969” which traces the recurring dream of eliminating software developers from COBOL…
How Rittman Analytics uses AI-Augmented Project Delivery to Provide Value to Users, Faster
Our latest case study features Barton Peveril College in Eastleigh, UK and the AI-augmented delivery approach we used to ship their Looker and Google Cloud MVP platform in December 2025. Over the past year we’ve quietly…
Rittman Analytics 2025 Wrapped : A Year of Platforms, People and High-Performing Data Teams
Spotify has Wrapped. Everyone else has year end lists. Here’s our take on 2025 at Rittman Analytics. The topics we kept coming back to 1. The semantic layer as the…
You Probably Don’t Need an RFP
Many organisations still use large, prescriptive RFPs to select partners for data platform and analytics projects. These documents often define architecture, scope, timelines and deliverables in detail before any discovery…
Claude Meets Looker: Building Smarter, Connected Analytics with Google’s MCP Toolbox
As well as Looker’s new built-in Conversational Analytics feature, you can now connect Looker to AI assistants such as Claude from Anthropic along with agentic developer tools such as Windsurf and Claude…
From Prompts to Skills: Automating Financial and KPI Analysis in Looker with Claude Skills and MCP Toolbox
A couple of weeks ago we shared an article about the new Looker MCP Toolbox and how AI assistants like Claude.ai can now use it to query data from your Looker semantic…
An Homage to Oracle Warehouse Builder, 25 Years Ahead of Its Time
It’s now apparently twenty-five years since the first release of Oracle Warehouse Builder, Oracle’s all-in-one developer tool for building Oracle Database-hosted data warehouses first released back in 2001. Since then the…
“Fivetran In Talks to Buy Dbt Labs”, reports The Information
A story in The Information published on Saturday 27th September 2025 reports that “Data Startup Fivetran In Talks to Buy Dbt Labs in Multibillion Dollar Deal”. The article is behind…
Google Integrates Spectacles into Looker for Continuous Integration & Regression Testing
When you’re developing LookML views and models in Looker, it’s possible that changes you’ve made could end-up breaking downstream looks and dashboards that rely on that LookML content; you might…
How Rittman Analytics Does Financial Analytics using Looker, Fivetran and Google BigQuery
As you’d expect from a data analytics consultancy that runs its business on Google Cloud, Google BigQuery and Looker, we use these services to provide the financial reports and dashboards…
Rittman Analytics is Riding from London to Brighton, 14th September 2025 for the British Heart Foundation
Six of the Rittman Analytics team are swapping SQL for saddles and Looker for Lycra as we cycle from London to Brighton on Sunday, 14th September 2025 in support of…
Opinionated, AI-Enabled & Modern: The Story Behind Rittman Analytics’ New Website
Over the past few years, we’ve built and modernised data platforms for dozens of digitally native businesses. The patterns are consistent: ambitious data goals, strong technical leadership and newly formed…
When Your Talented Data Team is Stuck in Second-Gear
You did everything right. You recognised the limits of spreadsheets, secured the budget, and invested in a talented data team. You’ve adopted the modern data stack with dbt, a cloud…
Integrating Looker and LangChain with langchain-looker-agent
We’ve just released a prototype of a new Langchain tool that enables LangChain applications and agentic workflows to connect to Looker, via its Open SQL Interface. In the past when…
Introducing Conversational Analytics, Data Agents and Code Interpreter in Looker and Looker Studio
Conversational Analytics is Google’s implementation of AI-powered natural language querying for Looker and Looker Studio. At its core, it enables users to interact with their data using everyday language rather…
London Looker Meetup – May 8th 2025 – Registration Open & Call for Speakers!
The first London Looker Meetup will be on Thursday, May 8th at the Google London — Pancras Square office from 17:30–20:30 and registration is now open! Back in 2019 Jonathan…
Drill to Detail Podcast Transcripts & Gen AI Insights Now Available, Powered by OpenAI Whisper API & BigQuery Colab Notebooks
We’ve been asked many times in the past for episode transcripts for the Drill to Detail Podcast, and I’m therefore pleased to launch our new Drill to Detail Podcast website…
How Rittman Analytics Automates Project RAG Status Reporting using Vertex AI, DocumentAI, BigQuery & Looker
A common way to report on the progress of a project is through RAG (Red, Amber Green) status indicators for the project, at the overall level and by cost, schedule,…
Deploying Maxwell’s Demon: QA Automation In Droughty
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Deploying Maxwell’s Demon: QA Automation In Droughty
Entropy is a bit of a pain, quite literally. As a 32 year old I’m already feeling the effects of it here and there. The effects of entropy are felt…
Previewing Studio in Looker, the (Eventual) Future of Self-Service Reporting for Looker
Google recently made Studio in Looker, an embedded version of Looker Studio that runs within the main Looker user interface and connects to Looker’s governed semantic layer, available in pre-GA…
We’re Hiring for our Next Great Senior Analytics Consultant
Rittman Analytics is looking to hire a Senior Analytics Consultant to join our delivery team helping clients modernise and scale their data capabilities. We’re looking for candidates with real-world experience…
Discover the Underlying Drivers of Multichannel Retail Sales Performance with BigQuery BQML Contribution Analysis and Looker Studio
Google BigQuery recently introduced a pre-GA preview of Contribution Analysis, an BQML feature designed to help analysts uncover the drivers of change in key business metrics. By comparing test and…
Coalesce 2024 and the Launch of dbt’s Visual Editing Experience
This week has seen Coalesce 2024, the analytics engineering conference organized by dbt Labs, running in Las Vegas and thanks again to Tristan and the team for putting on such…
See you at Coalesce 2024 in Las Vegas, October 7th – 10th 2024
Coalesce 2024, the analytics engineering and modern data stack conference organized by our friends and partners at dbt Labs, is running next week and I’ll be there all week representing…
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From the Archives
Adventures in Aggregate Awareness (and Level-Specific Measures) with Looker
Looker aggregate awareness is a performance optimisation feature that automatically directs users’ queries to use pre-aggregated summary tables instead of detail-level transaction tables, significantly improving the performance of reports and…
Agentic Data Platform Migration using Wire, Claude Code and Rittman Analytics
Migrating an entire analytics platform including the data warehouse, data source extractions, semantic layer, BI reports, orchestration and reverse ETL syncs from one stack to another used to be the…
IQR-Based Website Event Anomaly Detection using Looker and Google BigQuery — Rittman Analytics
Website event tracking bugs can become costly quickly. A deployment of a new website version that triggers events multiple times can increase your hosting charges or worse, lead to overage…
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Recent Posts
Agentic Data Platform Migration using Wire, Claude Code and Rittman Analytics
Making Agentic Analytics More Accurate using Anthropic’s Agentic Data Stack and the Wire Framework
Google Next 2026: What’s New for Looker, BigQuery, Data Platforms and Agentic Analytics
Introducing the Wire Framework: The “Secret Sauce” Behind Our AI-Augmented Analytics Project…
So, Just How Relevant is Multi-Touch Attribution to Marketers in 2026?
One Person Many Roles: Designing a Unified Person Dimension in Google BigQuery
Why We’ve Tried to Replace Data Analytics Developers Every Decade Since 1974
How Rittman Analytics uses AI-Augmented Project Delivery to Provide Value to Users, Faster
Rittman Analytics 2025 Wrapped : A Year of Platforms, People and High-Performing Data Teams
You Probably Don’t Need an RFP
