Every organization has one — a legacy system that everyone complains about but nobody dares to touch. Ours was a 20-year-old portfolio analytics application, deeply embedded in daily operations, built on Oracle, and loved by nobody except the people who depended on it every single day.
In this session, I'll walk you through a real enterprise migration to a modern Power BI + Databricks platform — from the first stakeholder conversation to production rollout. We'll cover the architectural decisions that kept us sane (Import vs. DirectQuery vs. Hybrid against Oracle and Databricks), how we handled Power BI governance and row-level security at scale across hundreds of workspaces, and what it actually takes to migrate users who have been clicking the same buttons for two decades.
You'll leave with a practical framework for approaching legacy BI migrations in regulated environments, honest lessons from the things that went wrong, and a clear picture of what Power BI can truly deliver when the stakes are high and the data is complex.

Key takeaways:

Power BI architecture patterns for migrating from legacy on-prem systems to a modern Databricks-backed platform
How to manage stakeholders and build trust during a high-risk platform transition
Power BI governance and RLS design for enterprise-scale semantic models
What to do when "good enough" is no longer good enough

Real ongoing migration in a regulated financial services environment.
Target audience: BI architects, data engineers, enterprise Power BI admins | Preferred duration: 60 min | No specific technical requirements — applicable to any organization facing legacy modernization