MINHAZ KAZI: Welcome to DataVis DevTalk.
I'm your host, Minhaz Kazi, developer advocate
for Data Studio.
In this video, we'll talk about community connectors
and how you can use them to fetch your data in Data Studio.
Let's get started.
Data Studio helps you to organize, access,
and understand your information.
Although different individuals and businesses
have different needs, it is often
useful to have a comprehensive view of their data.
You might have data from different sources,
social media, analytics, advertising, et cetera.
You might also have organizational data,
including sales, finance, and human resource.
Your data can be hosted and available in different places.
You might have on-premise private data.
For example, you might have marketing information
on a MySQL server on your corporate network.
You can have private data on the cloud.
Maybe you're using Firebase database for your application.
You can also be using data from commercial platforms
like Google Analytics and Google Ads.
Another interesting use case is using public data sets.
A prime example of that is the BigQuery public data
set which is available for everyone to use.
If you want to analyze and visualize your data
you'll need to connect to your data in Data Studio,
and that's where connectors come in.
Data Studio provides a number of connectors for you
to connect to your own data.
You can connect to a GCP data source
like Sheets, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage,
and Cloud Spanner.
You can connect to different Google services
like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Search Console,
YouTube Analytics, Attribution 360, and more.
There are also connectors available to connect
to your own instances of MySQL and PostgreSQL.
But what if your data is not in any of these sources
and is in somewhere else?
Well, in that case, you can use community connectors.
Community connectors are custom connectors
that you can create using Apps Script.
Apps Script is Google's scripting language.
It is a JavaScript platform on the cloud.
You can access it by going to script.google.com.
Apps Script lets you do more with Google.
Using it, you can increase the power
of all these Google applications by using their API
and also by building custom add-ons.
So when you create your own custom connector
using Apps Script, you can fetch data
from almost any internet-accessible data
source.
You can use web API endpoints, flash files like CSV, JSON,
XML, databases with JDBC APIs, and also
many Apps Script services.
In this video series, we will show
you step by step how you can build your own connector.
Once you've built a community connector,
you can obviously use it yourself
to bring in your own data into Data Studio.
Now your co-worker sees you using that connector
but thinks that it will be useful for them.
They don't have to build it from scratch again.
You can just share your connector with specific users.
After a certain time, several people in your organization
start using your connector, and it gets really popular.
You can make it securely available
within your organization.
That way, anyone in the organization can use it,
but the access and the data remain secure.
You can also make your connector available to everyone.
And one of the ways you can do it
is by publishing it to the Data Studio Partner Connector
Gallery.
There are more than 100 connectors available
that connect to over 500 data sources.
You can try out these partner connectors by visiting
the gallery at datastudio.google.com/data.
So that was an overview of community connectors.
In our next video, we will talk about how
community connectors work.
You can always go to our developer site
at developers.google.com/datastudio
for more information.
If you enjoyed this video, like and subscribe
to the GCB channel for more videos like this.
Thanks for watching.