Best practices for setting up repositories

[lbauer]

Should you use one repository or multiple repositories for Vault?

Here are some of the competing factors that affect whether to use separate repositories or not:

1. Your performance in any single repository will be much better if you break projects into separate repositories. The fewer nodes in your tree and the fewer working folders Vault needs to keep track of, the faster your refreshes, checkouts, labels, etc will be.

2. You can deny access to an entire repository without having to turn on repository security, which is nice, because security tends to get complicated, and there is also a slight performance penalty to check permissions on folders. It is far easier to simply prevent users from even seeing a repository (Vault 2.0 and later)

3. You cannot move, share, branch, or otherwise integrate information between repositories. (In Vault 3.5, you can export and import folders, but this is a time-consuming process, and not a substitute for good planning.)

4. There might be a slight management hassle of managing different repositories. Look in the Admin Tool Repositories Options screen, and note which things you might want to manage differently for different repositories. Most options can be applied to all repositories though.

5. SourceGear doesn't normally test with hundreds of repositories, so there may be quirks related to that. When you login, a repository list is presented, so if there are hundreds of them, it may be hard to find the one you want. On the other hand, Vault has login profiles, so you could set it up to only have to find the right one once.