Re: Transactions in LDAP

[Ellen Stokes <stokes@austin.ibm.com>]

At 06:05 PM 8/29/97 -0700, Uppili Srinivasan wrote:
>I remember there were some discussions about supporting transactions in
LDAP and there
>was a plan to form an engineering team to explore this.  Who is working on
this and What is the
>status?
>
>Thanks.
>-Uppili Srinivasan 
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A BOF on 'transactions in the LDAP' was held Wed Aug 13.  Companies
participating were IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Novell, and a couple others
(I apologize for not writing down a complete list).

We discussed several approaches to providing transactons in the LDAP
as well as what is required.  

The consensus was to keep it simple (no requirement for 2-phase commit).  
The proposal on the table is to add an ldap extension (could be an ldap
control or ldap protocol extension or something else) for begin/end/abort 
transaction.  Three scenarios were identified and these will be used to
evaluate the solution:
  client-server:  treat several ldap operations as a transaction (single 
			server)
  client-server: above case extended to multi-server for transactional 
			support in the ldap in support of intelligent networks 
			and routers
  server-server: replication cases

There is a transaction internet protocol (tip) working group.  We examined 
their work which is basically server-server only (tp monitor to tp monitor) 
and not interested in defining anything more; hence decided to ignore 
their work since not applicable for ldap needs. 
 
Cisco volunteered to co-author a draft with IBM in this ldap transactions
area. 

If I misstated anything or omitted anything, those of you who were there
please
feel free to chime in.

Ellen Stokes
IBM Austin
email: stokes@austin.ibm.com
phone: 512 838 3725