Customers used to complain that the tooling for creating BI projects (Analysis Services MD and Tabular, Reporting Services, and Integration services) has been based on earlier versions of Visual Studio than the ones they were using for their other work in Visual Studio (such as C#, VB, and ASP.NET projects).
To alleviate that problem, the shipment of those tools has been decoupled from the shipment of the SQL Server product. In SQL Server 2014, the BI tooling isn't even included in the released version of SQL Server. This allows the team to keep up-to-date with the releases of Visual Studio. A little while back, I was really pleased to see that the Visual Studio 2013 update for SSDT-BI (SQL Server Data Tools for Business Intelligence) had been released. Unfortunately, they then had to be withdrawn.
The good news is that they're back and you can get the latest version from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42313
The blog is amazing very impressive.
I just spotted that it was re-released as well.
My question is:
Will this re-released SSDT-BI for VS2013 work over a SQL Server 2012 database? I've got the software downloaded, but it's only making reference to SQL Server 2014 database Installation Center and VS2013.
We didn't have plans at the moment to upgrade from SQL 2012 to SQL 2014 since we recently made that move.
From what I've seen, the project file formats are unchanged. I've opened the projects in both VS2012 and VS2013 interchangeably without issue (so far), so I can't see why not.
Have you tried creating new projects by migrating SQL 2014 database with the new SSDT BI for VS 2013 installed ? Its not giving me any option to create a SQL database project on SQL 2014 however I can create SSAS and Tabular model using it.
The SSDT-BI install is just the BI project templates.
Have you installed the database project tooling from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/hh297027
If you develop SSIS projects, they get upgraded and you cannot open the dtsx packages in VS 2012 anymore after the upgrade.
I would recommend to only use this if you are developing for SQL Server 2014.