Installing SSAS and Preparing for Cube Development - Getting Started with SQL Server 2012 Cube Development - page 23

Translations
In many global organizations, there is a need to support multiple languages to sup-
port users in different countries with the same solution. In the multidimensional
cubes, you have the possibility of defining a translation of the metadata in the cube
as well as defining text values, such as the dimension attributes. The text values
should point to different values depending on what language the user has on its cli-
ent computer. This means that you can build one cube that can contain several rep-
resentations of the cube structure, but only have the data once. In the tabular model,
this is something that is missing, if you have the business requirement that you need
to support several languages you have to create different models for different lan-
guages.
Writeback
One important feature that you have in multidimensional cubes, is the possibility of
writing back values from the client to the cube and even to the relational database.
This can be used to create solutions such as budgeting and planning applications, or
to facilitate what-if analysis against data that resides in your cube. This is a feature
that is missing from the tabular model and there is no real way of working around
it, except for using the client-based tabular model that you have in Excel through
PowerPivot, and using a feature called linked worksheets. In this case, you do not
write the data down to the database, instead you are writing the value into the Excel
workbook.
Note
If you want to understand how to create a writeback enabled application, refer to
Chapter 6 , Adding Functionality to Your Cube .
Tool support
When it comes to the different end-user tools that can be used to query Analysis
Services, most of them work both against multidimensional cubes as well as tabular
models. There is only one exception and that is a new tool from Microsoft called