I hope you enjoyed learning about Google Data Studio. Let’s do a quick review of what you learned. A dimension is a data field that has a number of categories. A metric gives a measurement for each category in a dimension. You can reduce the amount of data displayed by using date ranges and filters.

Data Studio lets you connect to data in a variety of places, such as BigQuery and Google Analytics. When you create a connection to one of these places, that connection is called a data source. You have to add a data source to a report to use it.

Data Studio uses two levels of caching. It gets data from the query cache when you request the exact same query as a previous one. It gets data from the prefetch cache when it has correctly predicted what data you would request. You can disable the prefetch cache to save money, but you can’t disable the query cache. You can refresh both caches manually, though, by clicking the “Refresh data” button. You can only do this if you have editor access.

If you have more complex query requirements than Data Studio can handle on its own, then you can write a custom query. To see what queries Data Studio has run, you can look at the query history in the BigQuery console.

When you share a report, you can give people either view or edit access. Editors can change access for existing users and can even give access to other people. You can disable this for a particular report if you want. When you give out a shareable link, you can still restrict access to only people in your organization if you’d like. 

If you set a data source to use owner’s credentials, then people who don’t have access to the underlying dataset can still see the data in your report, although they won’t have direct access to the dataset itself. If you want to restrict access to only those people who already have access to the underlying dataset, then you can set the data source to use viewer’s credentials.

You can use any shared report as a template by simply making a copy of it, although the person sharing the report can disable copying to prevent that.

To learn more about Data Studio, you can read Google’s documentation. Also watch for new big data courses on Cloud Academy, because we’re always publishing new courses.

If you have any questions or comments, please let us know by emailing support@cloudacademy.com. Thanks!