A feature that many people require in SSAS Tabular is the ability to refactor existing names, doing a correspondent rename in all existing objects in the model. I agree that this is an important feature that should be added in the development environment, but this will help only the development cycle. Once you release a Tabular model, the names you published becomes part of queries created by the users. For example, if you save a pivot table, the objects selected (table, column, and measure names) are all part of the MDX code that is generated automatically by Excel. If you rename something… at the next refresh, Excel will remove renamed objects from the Pivot Table. In less politically correct way, any renaming operation potentially break existing reports.

Some years ago I heard from a student in a course that they were using translations in SSAS Multidimensional to avoid this issue. They were developing using English, but since users were using other languages (I was in North Europe) they had a decoupling layer between internal model names (in English) and external ones. Any rename operation was completely painless in this way.

A few days ago, I reminded that and I thought if it was usable for Tabular… and I discovered that you can also use a translation for the same primary language of your model! This is really interesting and deserve to be investigated more. Please, read my article Frictionless Renaming in Tabular Models with Analysis Services and give me your feedback if you have time to test this approach. I am curious to see possible issues of this technique. Thanks!