SSAS Tabular vs MultiDimensionalCube - Please advise

[mark77]

We use SSAS cubes for our reporting and are currently deciding on using Tabular or MultiDimensionalCubes with PowerBI.

We have quite some MultiDimensionalCubes in place. Tabular would mean rebuilding.

Question: I do not seem to be able to add new DAX formula in PowerBI while using MultiDimensionalCubes. I can do this with tabular model cubes in SSAS.

Is this correct? Is this feature disabled when using MultiDimensionalCubes? Or do I need to take other steps to make this work?

We want to compare performance between multidimensional and tabular ssas cubes with powerbi, so we can make the correct descision. In SQL Server 2019CU5 dimensional cubes were made available to PowerBI.

Your advice is most welcome? Do I have a choice at all?

It will require significant rework on existiging cubes. So the descision to switch to tabular, if needed, must be well founded.

(Not being able to use dax in the powerbi desktop client would clearly be a very good reason)

[amitchandak]

@mark77 , Once you create a live connection with SSAS cubes, you can not create columns, You should be able to report level measures -https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/desktop-analysis-services-tabular-data

refer:https://radacad.com/directquery-live-connection-or-import-data-tough-decision

[mark77]

Hi. Yes. This appears to work with tabular model. But not with multidimensional model. And that was the part I was struggling with. I had hoped that with the SQL Server 2019CU5 release this had been made possible. But it appears not to be.

[mark77]

Thanks. That conclusively answers my question. I guess we'll have to to a pile of rework to convert to tabular.

[sreenub · Accepted solution]

You can't create PowerBI level measures (using DAX )when authoring a report that is connected live to an SSAS multidimensional model. you can do this with  SSAS tabuler model.

Please go trough the below links  for more details.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/desktop-ssas-multidimensional#considerations-...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/desktop-ssas-multidimensional#supported-featu...