Re: Is anyone interested in SQL/ODBC backend? I have one...

["Christopher E. Brown" <cbrown@denalics.net>]

On Thu, 28 Oct 1999, Dmitry Kovalev wrote:

> Hi.
> 
> The situation is as follows. As possible part of a bigger project, I
> have developed a read-only backend for Umich slapd 3.3 that is intended
> primarily to _present_ information stored in an RDBMS as a set (tree) of
> LDAP objects.
> Suppose we have some centralized information system(s), based on RDBMS
> (maybe on different RDBMSes), which stores and manages things like
> persons info, publications, organization structure, or any other set of
> information resources. By adding several tables with meta information
> about mapping LDAP queries to RDBMS queries on each host, this backend
> allows to join these non-interoperable systems into single distributed
> system-independent LDAP tree.
> Or it could simply help one to publish data in his RDBMS to LDAP without
> having to maintain two copies of the same data in different places :)
> It has nothing to do with _putting_ information into RDBMS through LDAP
> -- I don't think it is a good idea, anyway -- the purposes and ways of
> LDAP and RDBMS are too different...


	I would agree, bi-directional LDAP/RDBMS transfers can get
more than a little complex.  The ability to put a read-only LDAP face
on a backend SQL box is a very useful thing, all those new apps that
can read there user and quota data from LDAP are just waiting to be
tied in with existing user databases.


> In fact, I don't even know if somebody had already done similar work,
> and what problems are currently in fashion here :)

	Not that I am aware of, and the LDAP <-- SQL tie-ins issue has
been around for a long while.

> PS. It is the first time that I'm posting anything anywhere, so excuse
> my Russian English and anything I might have done wrong ;)

	Close enough, other than minor tense and syntax fine, and
 understandable anyway.

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