Package Configuration for multiple ETL environments on the same server

Hello,

For a particular SSIS 2008 R2 ETL solution, we distinguish four environments:

1. Development
2. Test
3. User Acceptance Test
4. Production

We use the configuration approach described in 'Defining a Configuration Approach for Integration Services Packages' on MSDN, in particular theSQL Server Approach: At the server level an environment variable is defined which contains the connection string to the SQL Server configuration database. Every package configuration starts with the setting of the connectionstring of the connection manager of the configuration database using the environment variable followed by the necessary SQL Server Table configurations.

Now this approach works fine, except for the User Acceptance Test- and Production-environment. Point is thatthese environments reside on the same Windows server, i.e. share the same environment variable. Both environments have their own databasebase-server with an own configuration database. Packages reside on the file system and both environments have their own package location and SQL Server Agent Job which kicks off the main package with the dtexec utility. I quess you can now anticipate my problem/question: At startup (i.e. configuration phase) the main package references the environment variable which contains of course the connection string of just 1 configuration database (the one for User Acceptance Test or Production): the main package must decide which configuration database to use and the only clue it has is it's own execution location.  I can think of some workarounds and in practice our DBA has defined two environment variables (one for each environment/configuration database) and after each deployment of a new release manually update the XML of the packages (i.e. search/replace the name of the environment variable), not very nice. I'm a little bit puzzled because this seems to me a pretty common scenario (i.e. two ETL environments on the same machine) but I cannot find a clear solution
for the configuration of these environment.

Any suggestions?

Thanks very much,

Gert Broekhaar
RIVM, The Netherlands