Hi all,
I would like to draw your attention to the few modifications in SSAS behaviors in SQL 2012.

The most important difference you will find is the “Cube Browser”. Yes, it’s totally changed. According to Microsoft “The cube browser control that let you drag and drop fields onto a PivotTable structure in Management Studio or in Cube Designer has been removed from the product. The control was an Office Web Control (OWC) component. OWC was deprecated by Office and is no longer available.”

So, now what you have is the exactly same thing which you have in SSRS MDX Query builder.

I personally believe this change is better. If you remember in previous “Cube Browser” interface, it was Pivot table like we have in excel. When you drag-drop multiple dimensions, they form a group automatically. So sometimes you cannot see all the dimensions and measures at the same time in one view. This could be difficult at times for some analysis.

But with this new interface, you can place your dimensions and measures and can see them all at once. Pretty clear way to represent information, isn’t it?

There are also other things like, in previous Cube Browser, you could enable the “Toolbar” and do some quick operations like “Top 10”, “Bottom 10”, “Top %”, “Bottom %”, Row Totals, Column Totals and lot more. Well, you will have to write an MDX in the new interface and “The Toolbar is not available” 🙁

Though the good thing happened is, you have the MDX text editor where you can write MDX queries which was not possible in BIDS in Cube Browser. 🙂

Apart from these, here are some more changes in SSAS Features in SQL 2012 as far as its behavior is concerned:

1. Cube browser in Management Studio and Cube Designer has been removed
2. Higher permission requirements for using a PowerPivot workbook as an external data source
3. PowerPivot Gallery: New rules for snapshot generation for some PowerPivot workbooks
4. New default setting for load balancing requests changed from Round-Robin to Health-Based

You can fine the full story here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143682.aspx

I hope you have enjoyed this article. Please revert back if you have more things to add to this.
Thanks, Khilit
https://www.bigator.com