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 get an AI agent to reliably answer business questions against a complex analytics platform? The problem wi
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 of great-timing I managed to twist my ankle hiking around Zion National Park the weekend before it all started, and so ther
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 a production data platform is more complicated than that as it’s a co-ordinated engineering effort where everything ha
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 browser privacy features, regulatory requirements, and rising ad-blocker usage, the tracking landscape w
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 multiple roles over time. A consultant might be a staff member one day, a project lead the next and a contract signator
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 through to AI. Reading it, I recognised the same pattern playing out in my own field of data w
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 changed how we deliver analytics projects — not by replacing consultants with AI
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 foundation for everything else A lot of our writing this year circled around Looker, conversational analytics, and AI assisted BI. The c
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 work has taken place. Press enter or click to view image in full size While t
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 Code through Looker’s new Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, available as part of Google’s new
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 model, build dashboards, and even manage your Looker instance. However, if you wanted Claude to analyze your Profit & Loss data in L
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 world has moved to the cloud, big monolithic ETL suites have decomposed into t
“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 a paywall but in summary, says that: Fivetran is in advanced discussions to buy dbt Labs (but is not yet finalized or
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 our finance team needs to understand the trends and direction in our revenue, costs and profitability. In this b
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 the British Heart Foundation. We’re proud to be pedalling for a purpose. Every mile we ride is to help fund life‑saving research into h
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 teams still finding their way. Our new website at https://www.rittmananalytics.com reflects th
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 dashboards that return aggregated data. Once you have ena
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 charges from your event collection service vendor that you’d not planned for. A persistent popup can negatively
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 we’ve worked on AI-powered chatbots, dashboard narrative generators and data apps that use LangChain to orchestrate and
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 than having to learn SQL or navigate complex dashboard interfaces. The goal for conversat
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 where you can not-only listen to all our past episodes but also view transcripts along with analysis and key quotes from the ep
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, scope, technology and data quality. We’re currently piloting a Looker dashboard of this type to provide RAG status updates to our clien
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 by everyone and everything, from people trying to solve perpetual motion, to your charging cables mysteriously tangling themselves in your drawer despit
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 form for previewing and evaluation purposes before its full release next year. Complementing the existing
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 with Google Cloud Data Analytics (Looker, BigQuery etc) services along with dbt and other
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 control datasets, Contribution Analysis identifies which segments—defined by combinations of attribute
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 a great event. I won’t go into all the new product features introduced this week (this page on the dbt Labs website contains
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 Rittman Analytics. We’ve been to all of the Coalesce conferences since the first in-person one back in 2022 in New
Creating a Self-Learning Data Analytics SQL Chatbot using LangChain, RAG, Open AI and Google BigQuery Vector Store
In previous articles on this blog I’ve talked about Creating a Conversational Data Analyst Chatbot using LangChain, OpenAI, Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Functions and more recently, How Rittman Analytics Automates our Profit & Loss Reporting and Commentary using VertexAI Gemini 1.5-FLASH and Goo
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From the Archives
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 Palmer and I ran the Looker Dev Meetup in London, with the aim then and now being create a space for showcasing and discussing
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 have deleted or renamed a dimension or measure that’s used in one of your dashboards or you may have a sy
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 warehouse such as Snowflake or BigQuery along with a self-service BI tool such as Looker and yet … something is off. T
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Recent Posts
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
Claude Meets Looker: Building Smarter, Connected Analytics with Google’s MCP Toolbox
