Deprecated And Discontinued Functionality in SSAS 2017

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

In the past I’ve blogged about deprecated and discontinued functionality in SSAS 2014 and SSAS 2016; I forgot to check what’s deprecated and discontinued in SSAS 2017 until last week but it turns out that there are a few things that are worth knowing.

Here’s the link to the official documentation:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/analysis-services/analysis-services-backward-compatibility-sql2017?view=sql-analysis-services-2017

…and here are the definitions of ‘deprecated’ and ‘discontinued’:

A deprecated feature will be discontinued from the product in a future release, but is still supported and included in the current release to maintain backward compatibility. It’s recommended you discontinue using deprecated features in new and existing projects to maintain compatibility with future releases.

A discontinued feature was deprecated in an earlier release. It may continue to be included in the current release, but is no longer supported. Discontinued features may be removed entirely in a future release or update.

As far as discontinued features go it’s straightforward: everything that was deprecated in SSAS 2016 is now discontinued. For SSAS MD that means remote partitions, remote linked measure groups, dimension writeback and linked dimensions are now discontinued; I don’t think these features were ever used by more than a small number of people. Profiler is discontinued too and that’s more of a problem, given that the UI for Extended Events in SSMS remains awful and unusable for the kind of query performance tuning tasks I use Profiler for (I blogged about this issue here). The state of tooling for SSAS is already pretty bad and if Profiler stops working in the future the situation will be even worse; is it right that we have to rely on community-developed tools like DAX Studio and Analysis Services Query Analyzer, however good they are, for tasks like performance tuning?

There are two important deprecated features:

• SSAS Multidimensional data mining. Given that it has not had any new features now for a long, long time (even longer than the rest of SSAS MD) and was never very popular in the first place, I’m not surprised. However the example of Microsoft’s first, failed attempt at brining data mining to a wider audience is interesting in the light of the company’s attempts to do the same thing with Azure Machine Learning and other services. As far as I understand it the technology was never the problem and it was about as easy to use as it could be, so why did it fail? I’m not the right person to answer this question but I suspect the reasons include the following: Microsoft BI customers were not ready for data mining back when it was first launched; customers who did want data mining didn’t want to buy a product from Microsoft; very few Microsoft partners had the skills or experience to sell it; and finally is it even possible to do proper data science in a user-friendly GUI with no coding?
• SSAS Tabular models at the 1100 and 1103 compatibility level (for SSAS 2012 and SSAS 2012 SP1). Anyone that is still running Tabular models at this compatibility level really needs to upgrade, because they’re missing out on the great new features that have appeared in SSAS 2016 and 2017.

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/ .