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What is blending data?

Everybody who knows SQL and JOINS, blending data in Looker Studio is exactly this. So with blending, you can bring data located in different data sources together. You have to define conditions when the data matches and the result of the process is one new data source, you can use like all the other data sources.

Features in the new menu

To discover the new blending menu, we want to connect the following three data sources:

• Trips: One row is one trip with a starting and ending station and a lot of trips information
• Station Info: One row is one station and has general information about it
• Regions: One row is one region with the name of the region

​The first new feature and maybe also the most important one is the selection of the JOIN type. Before that, we have to select which dimensions are part of the join conditions

• Trips: start_station_id
• Station Info: station_id

Then we also have to add them as keys for the selected LEFT JOIN:

Then we also want to add the region name to the table and to do that, we have to join the region data to the table. Then you will see the other important new feature in the blending menu.

Then we have already a good overview of the current implementation:

The other new important change is the possibility to use different JOIN keys. Before the change, you have to use the same keys in all JOINs. Now you can select in every JOIN which field you want to set as key.

It would be nice if you could see which key is being used in which JOIN (currently just visible in the joining menu).

The rest is still the same as before. So when the join works as intended, you can select all the needed fields.

So I would name 3 new features:

• Select different JOIN operations
• Use different JOIN keys in different JOIN operations
• A new menu to manage the JOINs

Why you should not use blending in Looker Studio

We always have some discussions about using blending data in Looker Studio. To say it at the beginning, we found cases when it makes sense to use blending inside your reports (Especially self-joins are a powerful opportunity to level up your visualization).

But you should try at first to join the data in your database.

• You have much more possibilities to connect your data with SQL
• You have Version Control to see the changes from everybody
• Furthermore, especially if you have a lot of people working with the data, it is better to connect the data once in the database and then every dashboard creator uses the same data source.

Otherwise, all creators blend data on their own, do mistakes and the data is not correct and uniform anymore.

Conclusion

The new blending menu has some good improvements, especially the new handling and appearance of the menu is more intuitive. Additionally, the most important new feature is the availability of all JOIN types in my mind.

But it has still some restrictions, you can just circumvent when you connect your data inside your database.

Further Links

This post is part of the new features in the Google cloud series from datadice and gives you detailed insights about a new feature in BigQuery or Looker Studio.

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If you want to learn more about how to use Google Looker Studio and take it to the next level in combination with BigQuery, check our Udemy course here.

If you are looking for help to set up a modern and cost-efficient data warehouse or analytical dashboards, send us an email to hello@datadice.io and we will schedule a call.

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