Partition Bug with Visual Studio

There is a glaring bug with Multidimensional and Visual Studio 2012 and above. When attempting to add a new partition, the Partition Wizard finishes without error but no partition is added. Interestingly, no one has reported this bug more than two years after these Visual Studio editions have shipped. A couple of workarounds exist:

  1. Use SSDT or Visual Studio 2010 to create partitions. You can open your SSAS 2012 project in any Visual Studio edition starting with 2010.
  2. Add the partition either programmatically using AMO or by making changes directly to the *.partitions file.

On the subject of partitions, note that MS has marked the following features deprecated:

  • Remote partitions
  • Remote linked measure groups
  • Linked Dimensions
  • Dimension writeback

These features won’t be terribly missed. I haven’t seen remote partitions being used in real life except in BI certification exams. Linked measure groups also needs linked dimensions, but again, nobody in practice appears to use cross-server linked measure groups. These are cool features “on paper” which could and perhaps should have been popular, but they’ve never caught on enough for various reasons. If you do use them, now it’s time to provide feedback to MS. If you give them a good reason why you need a feature, they will probably reconsider.