Deprecated And Discontinued Functionality In SSAS 2016

Reposted from Chris Webb's blog with the author's permission.

Some time ago I blogged about the deprecated and discontinued functionality in SSAS 2014, so I thought it would be a good idea to follow my last post on what’s new in SSAS 2016 Multidimensional with a discussion of what’s going or gone from it.

The same page that I linked to last time has been updated for 2016, and there are four more subpages with all the details. There’s nothing much interesting to say about the breaking changes (basically AMO has been rejigged) or behaviour changes (there’s no in-place upgrade for Tabular models using DirectQuery – you have to open the project and edit some settings) but the other two pages do have some news worthy of comment:

Discontinued Functionality

Here’s the official definition of a discontinued feature:

A discontinued feature is one that is no longer supported. It might also be physically removed from the product.

A few comments about what is now discontinued:

1. The Non_Empty_Behavior property for calculated measures. To be honest, I’m happy to see this go: it doesn’t usually make much difference to performance and in most cases people use it incorrectly too. It really should be removed from Form View in the SSDT cube editor.
2. COM assemblies. Note that this is not the same thing as .NET assemblies like the Analysis Services Stored Procedure Project! If you are using a custom MDX function implemented in a COM assembly you will probably find that the equivalent function implemented in a .NET assembly is a lot slower, but in my experience it’s almost always possible to avoid custom functions completely and use pure MDX – and this will give you the best query performance.
3. I’m a bit sad to see the CalculationCurrentPass() and CalculationPassValue() functions die because you could do cool things like this with them, but I haven’t actually needed to use them for a long, long time.

Deprecated Functionality

Here’s the official definition of a deprecated feature:

A deprecated feature is a feature will be cut from the product in a future release, but is still supported and included in the current release to maintain backward compatibility. Typically, a deprecated feature is removed in a major release, often within two releases of the original announcement. For example, deprecated features announced in SQL Server 2012 are likely to be unsupported by SQL Server 2016.

A few comments on what’s been deprecated:

1. The only thing that someone may possibly be using on the list of features that will not be supported in the next major release is linked dimensions; remote partitions and remote linked dimensions were always a very bad idea.
2. The death of dimension writeback (note: not the same thing as writing values back to cells) is a bit of a shame: I never needed to use it, and most client tools didn’t support it, but it always struck me as one of those features that people might have used more if they had known about it.
3. I see session cubes (as used by Excel PivotTables’ grouping functionality) will not be supported in a future release, which is probably a good thing given all the problems they cause. However I bet there are a lot of Excel workbooks out there that will be affected when this does go.
4. Local cubes will also go in a future release, though I doubt anyone uses them anymore. That said, I think it would be really useful if there was something similar that allows you to create a Power Pivot model that was a local copy of an SSAS Tabular database, with the option to filter the data in it. Offline access is not so important these days but this would allow users to create their own customised Power Pivot models from a properly designed, central model rather than always having to start from scratch.
5. Profiler for trace capture is also deprecated, and I discussed this in-depth here.

Chris has been working with Microsoft BI tools since he started using beta 3 of OLAP Services back in the late 90s. Since then he has worked with Analysis Services in a number of roles (including three years spent with Microsoft Consulting Services) and he is now an independent consultant specialising in complex MDX, Analysis Services cube design and Analysis Services query performance problems. His company website can be found at http://www.crossjoin.co.uk and his blog can be found at http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/ .