Advice for Using 'old' cube

[StitoTheGreat]

We have a rather large old multidimensional 2012 SSAS cube, 120+ dimensions and a whole bunch of measures. It was created 5+ years ago. It is used as the source for a suite of SSRS reports and was never designed to be exposed directly to users so a
lot of the naming conventions are rubbish and there are a lot of redundant attributes.

We are now starting to use Power BI to make this available to power users. Problem is the cube would really need a good tidy
up but I cant touch it because all the reports would break and there are more than 100 of them. I know I could use a
perspective to hide some stuff but I can't use that to rename attributes etc. I don't want to create a copy and have to
maintain 2 cubes, one specifically for Power BI.

Is my best option to create an imported dataset in Power BI Desktop, edit this, publish to the service, stick on a refresh
schedule and share with everybody? I guess I then create roles on the dataset and manage permissions that way?

I'm not sure if all this would actually be better than just creating another cube!!

Any help / thoughts / advice much appreciated - thanks.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

@StitoTheGreat,

Firstly, you don't have to create new cube.  In Power  BI Desktop, you can connect live to SSAS database, just make sure that your SQL Server is 2012 SP1 CU4 or later and you have the Business Intelligence or Enterprise SQL version.

Secondly, in live connection mode, you don't need to create roles in Power BI and manage permissions there, you can define security roles in SSAS cube assigning different permissions for different users. Then create report in Power BI Desktop, publish it and share the report in Power BI Service. Users will only view the data they have permission on in Power BI report . For more details, please review this similar article:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-tutorial-row-level-security-onprem-ssas-tabular.

Regards,
Lydia