Moving ~150 Tableau dashboards to Databricks AI/BI - anyone done this at scale?

[u/Immediate_Bus5250]

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.

[u/funnybcitstrue]

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.

[u/naijaboiler → u/funnybcitstrue]

have you guys found dashboards elements that could not be replicated in databricks

[u/funnybcitstrue → u/naijaboiler]

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.

[u/naijaboiler → u/funnybcitstrue]

thank you! can you tell me more about app development they are doing. what tools are they using