Migrating to Holistics

This is the overview of the migration process from Power BI → Holistics:

1. Convert your .pbix file to a .pbip project so the semantic model is exposed as TMDL text (File > Save As > Power BI Project (*.pbip))

2. Connect Holistics to your data warehouse

3. Migrate the project one concept at a time:

• (Optional) Move heavy ETL out of Power Query (M) into upstream SQL or dbt
• Convert PBI tables to Holistics models (table or query type)
• Convert relationships to Holistics dataset relationships
• Convert DAX measures to AQL or SQL metrics
• Convert calculated columns to dimensions
• Rebuild reports as Holistics dashboards

4. Validation:

• Compare a sample of measure values between PBI and Holistics
• Re-create one report end-to-end and review with a stakeholder before scaling out

Items that need manual migration

A few Power BI features map to Holistics concepts that live outside the .pbip project, so they can't be lifted from TMDL or JSON. Plan to re-create them manually:

Power BI	Holistics equivalent	Notes
Data alerts	Alerts	Re-create thresholds and recipients in Holistics.
Scheduled refresh / subscription	Schedule & email reports	Holistics schedules send dashboard snapshots; no warehouse refresh job needed.
Embed in app / Publish to web	Embedded analytics	Embed tokens and iframe URLs must be reissued.
Share link / publish to web link	Shareable link	Generate fresh links in Holistics and update any docs / wikis that point to PBI.

Each of these has a Holistics REST API you can use to bulk-create them from a CSV or script, which is the fastest path when you have dozens of alerts or embeds to migrate.

Project structure

If you're used to a .pbip folder layout, here's how the same project looks in Holistics:

power-bi-project/                   holistics-project/
  project.pbip                        models/
  project.Dataset/                      tables/
    definition/                           orders.model.aml
      model.tmdl                          users.model.aml
      tables/orders.tmdl                queries/
      tables/users.tmdl                   active_users.model.aml
      expressions.tmdl  (M code)
  project.Report/                     datasets/
    definition.pbir                     ecommerce.dataset.aml
    report.json                         marketing.dataset.aml
                                      dashboards/
                                        sales.page.aml
                                        performance.page.aml