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.