Showing OLAP UniqueNames in PowerBI
I just had the request to expose the UniqueNames of an Analysis Services Multidimensional cube in PowerBI. You may ask why I would want to do this and the answer is actually pretty simple: In SSAS MD the caption of elements/members even within the same attribute is not necessarily unique. This is because of the Key/Name concept where the elements/members are grouped by the Key but for the end-user a proper Name is displayed. So if you happen to have duplicate Names in your cube, import the values into PowerBI you will end up with less rows (and wrong values!) compared to the original SSAS MD cube because PowerBI (and also Analysis Services Tabular) does not have a Key/Name concept and therefore the grouping and what is display is always the same.
Tags: tabular