SQL Server 2012: SSAS enhancements

My previous blog, SQL Server 2012 (“Denali”): Details on the next version of SSAS, talked about the major new feature in SSAS, which is BISM. But what other changes are there? Well, not much. Here are details on the few changes I have found:

All development work is now done in Visual Studio 2010, with BIDS replaced by SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT)
String stores in dimensions attributes or partitions has a 4 GB maximum file size per store (strings are stored separately from numeric data to allow for optimizations based on characteristics of the data). If your dimensions or partitions include string stores of this size, you can work around the file size constraint by changing the string storage architecture to the new “scalable string storage”. The maximum limit for scalable string storage is 4 billion unique strings or 4 billion records, whichever occurs first
Queries that include DistinctCount in a ROLAP process can run faster, assuming certain criteria are met
NUMA is now supported, allowing for more than 64 processors
You can now use SQL Server Extended Events (XEvents) to monitor Analysis Services
New Profiler events: Resource Usage (you can capture the number of reads or writes, reads or writes as measured in kilobytes, CPU time in milliseconds, rows scanned, and rows returned)
New Trace events: Locks Acquired, Locks Released, and Locks Waiting
New Analysis Services PowerShell provider and cmdlet