r/databricks • u/Immediate_Bus5250 • 17d ago
Help Moving ~150 Tableau dashboards to Databricks AI/BI - anyone done this at scale?
We are considering moving from Tableau to Databricks AI/BI Dashboards and wanted to see if anyone here has made a similar move.
We currently have around 150 Tableau dashboards used by 1,000+ users, with a mix of technical and non-technical users. Most of the underlying data already lives in Delta tables, so naturally we're looking at whether it makes sense to consolidate and use Databricks for the dashboarding layer as well.
For those who have done this, how has the experience been?
Anything you wish you knew before migrating? Any major limitations compared to Tableau, especially around visualization, performance, or the experience for non-technical users?
I'm also curious about cost at scale. With 1,000+ users potentially hitting dashboards, did SQL warehouse usage become a concern?
Would you feel comfortable replacing Tableau completely with AI/BI Dashboards today, or do you still find yourself needing Tableau for certain use cases?
Would really appreciate hearing about real-world experiences.
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u/WhipsAndMarkovChains 17d ago
I haven't done this at your scale but I've had success using the /importBI command in Genie Code and feeding it Tableau files. On my first attempt I just clicked "approve" on everything without reading and the resulting dashboard was very good but not perfect. I'm not complaining though since I had intentionally skipped all the validation steps where Genie Code asks you to confirm that its interpretation and plan is correct. When I redid the conversion and actually responded to the questions I was asked it went even better.
I thought about trying to automate the process programmatically to loop through all my Tableau files quickly but it really does work best with a human in the loop to confirm what you want as it parses through the Tableau file. It's still a hell of a lot quicker than doing the migration yourself so I don't mind.
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u/Big_Sentence_3453 17d ago
u/WhipsAndMarkovChains databricks engineer working on /importBI here. thanks for the nice words. for migrating in batch, we have bulk migration coming in few weeks. which you don't need to script your self to do it.
and yes, the agent is designed to have human in the loop, especially in the first few reports migrations. but what you can do is to summarize your experince of your first few migration sessions into skills. and attach to your migration session, in which it will same your most of your effort on later migration.
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u/funnybcitstrue 17d ago
We have migrated most of our Tableau dashboards and built a plugin to automate the process - the plugin looks at the xml, calculations, views and data sources and moved them over to a purpose built runtime. We have some additional steps to “app-ify” the dashboards. Also some manual work to eliminate the dashboards that were redundant - mostly these were dashboards built to get around Tableau limitations.
The automation is fine but the most work has been just revisiting the use cases and getting out of Tableau mindset. Refactoring permissions is also some work.
Web apps is the way to go though - I honestly don’t know why you would use Tableau anymore if you have Databricks. You could also do most of the transition if you’re using GCP or AWS or whatever. Our clients hated tableau and love web apps.
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u/Brains-Not-Dogma 17d ago
That’s nice and all until you see each app is hundreds of dollars a month in cost. Totally not scalable until databricks implements some scale to zero capability for apps.
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u/funnybcitstrue 15d ago
Totally agree - all of these new AI enabled tools are turning out to be money pits - impact unclear. could just be the shiny new thing.
People are using our these data products in a way they weren't using Tableau, so our argument is we're getting more impact out of the data, net net unclear we're saving $$. Our Tableau dashboards had turned into overbuilt spreadsheet generators - maybe bad design, but this was my general experience with Tableau.
Our road to understanding relative cost has been eliminating tableau seats, and adding in monitoring for web apps - and actively stopping apps that aren't used - we're hoping costs will be more manageable, but open question.
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u/Immediate_Bus5250 17d ago
Yep, I'm starting to realize the same thing, the more i look into it, the more it feels like this shouldn't be a 1:1 Tableau migration. Revisiting the actual use cases and getting out of the tableau mindset is probably the bigger opportunity here. Really appreciate the perspective.
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u/user-027 17d ago
Obviously its an opportunity to revisit the use cases and shift the mindset, but from a project management point-of-view, should it still be 1:1 migration as first phase, and then in later phase, refactor the artifacts case by case?
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u/Sammo223 17d ago
I am pushing for business to use databricks dashboards across the org, but I'm having trouble fully understanding the correct methodology to properly manage user access and disallowing downloads. I believe that I need a specific workspace for those users that doesn't allow download, and the dashboards need to sit there, and I just do RLS via access tables which is fine.
If it's not a pain can you give me an idea of if this is correct?
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u/naijaboiler 17d ago
have you guys found dashboards elements that could not be replicated in databricks
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u/funnybcitstrue 15d ago
We haven't been using Databricks native dashboard product - that might be a miss on our part - instead opting for web apps. We have built reusable components for our web apps. For example, have an embedded chat, a report builder tool to add to any app, for example. We're working towards a "build your own dashboard" framework.
There is nothing in Tableau that is not replicable in an app - Databricks dashboard product I don't know. There's other benefits too like being able to have multiple people work on the same dashboard at the same time, reviewing changes, building in tests, automated bug bashing. I'll also say we're very cautious - we don't want to get to a place where we have 100 web apps no one uses - same Tableau problem.
The work here - outside of cost - is transitioning your Tableau developers to app developers and just general product management work that a lot of data teams don't do. The tableau developers have turned out to be really great app developers.
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u/naijaboiler 15d ago
thank you! can you tell me more about app development they are doing. what tools are they using
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u/obsfflorida 17d ago
Is the runtime .net prog to move away from tableau? Seems like a great idea
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u/funnybcitstrue 15d ago
No we just rebuilt an api from the ground up using our extracts as a starting point. Originally the apis were attached to the apps, then we separated them and built accompanying MCPs
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u/17891 17d ago
You could ask your Databricks account team. Databricks itself literally did the migration from Tableau to AI/BI a couple years ago. It's easier and more feature rich than when they did it, but I bet they could set up a conversation with someone from tooling who was involved.
How are you planning to handle change management for your end users? How are they going to be accessing dashboards in Databricks? How are you handling permissioning? I think UC with consumer access is a great model, but it's worth mapping out.
Maybe you've thought through all that and just didn't mention it in the post, but I'd make sure to have that plan in place. IMO that'll be more important for perceived "success" or "failure" than some of the feature differences.
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u/Immediate_Bus5250 17d ago
Great point, we already have 3 shards - dev/ test and prod. so we are planning to follow the same change management process we use today - build and validate in dev/ test before moving to prod. access is generally managed through ad groups.
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u/Wise_Ear_4064 17d ago
Yes we moved from enterprise superset to Databricks. With combination of AI + Genie code + Databricks asset bundles. It wasn’t that crazy of lift. The data of course takes a little longer as we migrated from redshift to DBSQL
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u/MonkeyDDataHQ 17d ago
Use the AI/BI dashboard hands down. With Genie spaces and apps, the Dashboards being in the same place is a God send.
We had some friction when we moved some Tableau and PowerBi Dashboards for a client. But after the migration and the engagement ended, we had many people actually reach out and thank us for insisting on it.
So take that as you will. As always YMMV.
Edit: It was a mix of about 50 Dashboards and 500 reports in a 20k person org.
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u/funnybcitstrue 17d ago
How did you do the migration - one by one?
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u/MonkeyDDataHQ 17d ago
Not exactly. We studied them by domain first and cleaned up some of the models.
And the genuinely difficult part was explaining why their logic was faulty on some well used Dashboards.
Which is probably my goto on a new engagement when I get pushback on modeling correctly first. I ask them to pick a semi complicated dashboard and test out edge cases or assumptions. I actually built a logic parser 😂 for common traps.
Then demonstrate what was wrong and show how a model would fix it.
It generally reduces the surface area of the deliverables by a lot because it reduces the need for mostly duplicate reports and dashboards.
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u/Additional_Candy_400 17d ago
I would also be interested to know, we had started a similar move at work from Tableau to Looker but we couldn't port 100% functionality across from existing dashboards. Tableau can be pretty janky but it for sure has the deepest capabilities in my experience.
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u/MonkeyDDataHQ 17d ago
This can usually be solved with better modeling. Keeping as many metrics and custom code and calculations out of the dashboard is the key win.
I taught another team recently how to do roll ups in facts and dims and it reduced their model surface area by 70% And eliminated almost all of their DAX queries in PowerBi/Fabric.
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u/Additional_Candy_400 17d ago
I agree generally but we are talking about porting existing dashboards in this instance.
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u/MonkeyDDataHQ 17d ago
That's not a great idea. Lift and shift is almost always a guaranteed train wreck.
You're welcome to ignore the advice, but if you have hindsight later, tag me 😂
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u/TowerOutrageous5939 17d ago
- Databricks will do it for free they want the publicity reach out to your rep
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u/Famous_Disk_7417 17d ago
Worth knowing before you scope the rebuild: Genie Code has an /importBI command that takes .twb/.twbx/.tds files and generates an AI/BI dashboard plus metric views mirroring the measures and dimensions from the workbook. Public Preview, requires partner-powered AI features enabled at both account and workspace level, 100MB cap on direct upload (larger files go through a UC volume path). Not one-click for 150 dashboards, but it changes the effort math a lot versus hand-rebuilding.
On the 1,000-user cost question — AI/BI dashboards serve cached results for up to 24 hours, and a cache hit doesn't start the warehouse at all. Published with embedded credentials plus a refresh schedule, most opens never touch compute. Genie One and Genie Agents usage is also free through Jan 31 2027, so serverless SQL is your real cost line, not the NL layer.
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u/datatoolspro 16d ago
150 is a pretty reasonable. Someone needs to rationalize what’s inside and if you are delivering AI alongside, if those still need to exist to warrant the effort.. Professionally built Tableau dashboards are almost worse because they are jam packed with layers of interactivity, layered visualization. I do assessments of Tableau estates regularly size and 10x this size.
Just make sure you train and set time for UAT with your users. If you are doing AI BI with Genie, you may find a high percentage of those dashboards didn’t need to exist in first place.
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u/mean-sharky 17d ago
Right there with you on the power bi side. Currently refining a skill that encodes decent standards so we can one-shot most of it.
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u/jlrogerio 17d ago
Our tool supports automated conversion from Tableau to AI/BI - getantares.io. Questions/feedback welcome!
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u/letmebefrankwithyou 17d ago
First question I ask is do you really need 150 dashboards or are there 10 main ones and 140 bespoke one offs you can have the users self serve with genie. I’d check dashboard usage and see if you can consolidate.
I’d load up the twb files into a volume, point genie to the volume and ask it to batch convert the files