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Re: Relational database as backend?
I'm a "mere" student administrator in a seminary program that
keeps me pretty darned busy, so I'm reluctant to undertake
a programming task at this moment.
However, my interest in a relational backend is to allow
other tools to access the information. In particular,
I felt being able to use commonly available tools like
Access or PowerBuilder (my own field of expertise) would
be useful to us.
The first presentation mentioned (your own) mentions performance
problems with using a relational backend. Other than the standard
"low-overhead network/hierarchical database versus high-overhead
relational database" issue, I can't see how the relational database
would be a problem. (I'm new to LDAP, so please forgive my complete
ignorance of its schema.)
My own area of professional expertise (prior to coming to the
seminary one year ago) is information systems, particularly
client/server relational databases and associated tools.
Databases are used quite a bit for just the sort of stuff that
LDAP is storing, and performance is quite good. With the increase
in replicaton offerings from the major vendors (Sybase comes
to mind), would that replication make LDAP's replication
superfluous?
At this point, I'd like to hear more about the specific
aspects of LDAP that would prevent good performance in a
relational database. Please don't take any of this as
argumentative. I'm just an LDAP newbie trying to learn.
Daryl
On Sun, 25 Oct 1998 Jeff.Hodges@stanford.edu wrote:
> mewilcox@unt.edu said:
> > Netscape Directory server allows you to use a RDBMS backend if you
> > don't mind writing some code (you have to write your own server plugin
> > to lookup stuff in a RDBMS). I don't think openLDAP supports this yet.
> > Other packages might as well, though I don't know about them.
>
> UMich LDAP release 3.3, and thus OpenLdap 1.0, ~does~ support pluggable
> backend databases. Layering slapd on top of an RDBMS is a SMOP (small matter
> of programming). Tho, one has to carefully consider ~why~ one'd want to do
> that. As pointed out in prior messages, these slides & doc discuss such
> matters...
>
> http://www.stanford.edu/~hodges/talks/EMA98-DirectoryServicesRollout
> /Steve_Kille/index.htm
>
> http://www.isode.com/IC-6055.html