int i;

Configuration directives appearing after a

    backend <type>

Slapd implements different types of backends; other types can be user-defined.

Backends can be roughly grouped in three distinct groups:

• backends that actually store data
• backends that proxy otherwise stored data
• backends that generate data on the fly

(The following mostly refers to 2.2 and later versions)

The first group contains bdb, hdb and ldbm:

• bdb uses Berkeley's Sleepycat (at least 4.2.52 with patches) as storage, taking advantage of specific ACID features;
• hdb shares most of the code with bdb, but uses a hierarchical in-memory organization of the tree structure, which is not saved on disk in index files. As such, it can be much more efficient at writing, with the penalty of requiring a bit longer at startup to recreate the indices. Eventually, it will replace bdb;
• ldbm uses a neutral storage interface which in principle could wrap dbm, ndbm, gdbm or sleepycat as underlying storage; however, only Sleepycat is considered a reliable choice, so bdb offers more interesting features (ACID). Eventually it will disappear.

The second group contains ldap, meta, relay and sql:

• ldap: proxies a remote DSA;
• meta: proxies a pool of remote DSAs, sharing (part of) the naming context;
• relay: proxies a local database; is used to create virtual views of real databases.
• sql: maps an existing RDBMS into a DSA (with limitations);

The third group contains dnssrv, monitor, null passwd, perl and shell (tcl is no longer supported):

• dnssrv: returns referrals according to DNS SRV mappings (RFC 2782) ;
• monitor: returns monitoring info;
• null: compare always returns false; bind always fails; search is always successful, but returns no results; all write operations are always successful, but data is simply discarded; inspired by /dev/null.
• passwd: maps binds, searches and compares to /etc/passwd contents;
• perl: allows to execute a set of perl scripts to perform each operation;
• shell: allows to execute a set of shell scripts to perform each operation;

See What is a database? and slapd-<backend> for details.
ando@sys-net.it