Direct vs. Indirect Package Configurations

If your XML configuration files will be in the same location on your Development, UAT and PROD servers, is there any merit to making your configurations indirect?

I am modifying the connection string with the XML. My strategy is to set up an XML configuration for each database that we have. The Dev XML config will point to Development connection, UAT to UAT etc..

My thought is that by using the direct configuration it will eliminate the need for environment variables and also allow me to add configs without having to reboot the servers, which you would need to do in order to get server to recongize the EV.

Thanks

There isn't in real advantage to using indirect XML configurations if you're 100% sure that the location of your configuration file is never going to change and be identical in development, staging, and production environments. However, indirect configuration are a huge advantage if the location of your configuration files should change. Our project has over 50 SSIS packages (and growing) and I would hate to be the poor sap that would have to go change and test each and every package should the configuration file location ever was changed.|||

By the way, I wrote a batch configuration changer that you can use to modify the configuration settings in a group of packages. It's available as part of the downloadable samples for my book. A few have used it and saved some time with it.

It's called ConfigBatch.exe.

You can select a set of packages and bulk add, delete, modify configurations within those packages.

K

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Dear Kirk,

I got your book, and downloaded the samples. For the Config utility you included an msi, but the batch utility was a c# project. I don't have c# in my visual studio, could you perhaps mail an msi or .exe?

btw, the book is very readable so far (I'm at chapter 4).

thanks,

John.