When migrating SAS OLAP cubes, the Migration Utility migrates the metadata without changes and without validating any of its contents such as paths for physical cube files. The attribute that indicates whether the physical cube exists also persists during the migration. There are several scenarios where this can affect the behavior of the cube after migration. The physical cube files are not migrated or copied.

If the cube metadata is migrated, marked to be rebuilt, and the paths defined are valid or network-accessible paths, the cube should be rebuilt without issue.

If the cube metadata is migrated, marked to be rebuilt, and the paths are not valid (not network accessible, not defined on the new machine, or the physical files do not exist on the new machine), then the rebuild will likely fail. This is due to the fact that a DELETE_PHYSICAL step is submitted. The DELETE_PHYSICAL step fails because the physical files do not exist. You also receive an error message similar to the following:

ERROR: An internal cube file could not be found.  The physical files for this
cube might have been deleted.
ERROR: The physical cube cannot be deleted.

If the cube metadata is migrated and the physical cube files are moved but a modification to the PATH defined is required, you might have to use the DELETE_PHYSICAL option before the PATH attribute can be changed to reflect the new location.