Multiple projects and their promotion from Develop to Test to Production

Question

A customer has an interConnect infrastructure running about 5 projects. Each project has a Development, a Test, an Acceptance and a Production environment.
This basically works, but is really cumbersome to maintain.
They want to reduce the number of Interconnect installations as much as possible to ease maintenance. The iConnect version is 10gR1.
As far as I can see there are two options:
1) Put all projects into a single repository. You'd end up with only 4 InterConnect environments (Development, Test, Acceptance and Production)
2) Put all hub schemas into a single DB
The first one is obviously our favourite, but can you promote a single project to a new environment (say, from Development to Test) without affecting the other projects in the same repository? How difficult (if possible) is this? What are the possibilities and risks?
What are the possibilities for option number 2?
I hope anybody can give me some advice.
Arjan

Answer 1

Its slightly confusing about having multiple projects, the reason being the way Interconnect works is that it has a single database repository and when you create a project it is just a view on that repository. Therefore a project and a repository are essentially one and the same.
Therefore it would imply that if you have 5 separate projects then you also have 5 separate repository instances.
In terms of your options:
1) is the general way that most projects work. Lets say you have DEV, SYS, UAT, PROD. Therefore you'd generally have a repository instance for each env, therefore 4 repository instances, HUBDEV - for DEV env, HUBSYS for SYS env etc... These repositories would usually be in separate Oracle Instances although they could be on the same servers. Therefore the Hub schema for all, would be the normal one installed by the product, OAIHUB904. Then you would also have a single project for each repository. This repository would hold all the metadata for all your interfaces that go though this HUB instance.
As interfaces move through the various phases then you migrate between the different repositories, to move stuff from DEV to SYS etc...
2) From my understanding, this is not much differnet to the above except you want to hold all the Hub schemas in a single database instance. This is possible by creating each schema with a differnet name, OAIHUB904DEV, OAIHUB904SYS etc... and you would need to change the necessary infrastructure ini files to use these new names. With this setup you would still have 1 project per repository but it would just point to the relevant schema.
Let me know if you have any more queries.
Regards
Stuart.