LDAP vs. Relational

[Tod Thomas <tthomas@chubb.com>]

First, let me apologize if this question sounds a bit naive or has been
asked before.  It came up in a meeting I attended a few days ago and I
think it is relevant.  I  have to admit I don't have a complete answer
and thought it would be best to present it to a larger community to get
a broader perspective.

I've been involved in directory services using LDAP off and on for about
a year now.  My approach has been that LDAP provides a centralized
resource of relatively static information that can be easily accessed by
a standard set of API calls. With that in mind I have implemented a
directory that has H/R information that can be shared over our Intranet
and accessed using a standard web browser.

However a larger number of software manufacturers, relational database
in particular, are marketing themselves as LDAP compliant.  The LDAP
API's can be used against a relational database and data will be
returned as if it was a directory.  I've done this against a Lotes
Domino database and although limited, it works satisfactorily.

The question is this:  If I can get information that I could store in
the directory from an LDAP compliant database using the API calls what
would be the point of installing and supporting a directory ?  Would it
not then be reduced to a programming exercise of pointing your
application to the named database that has a version of slapd running?

Please enlighten me.  I think my efforts and my time invested thus far
have been worthy but I need to provide better justification if I want to
expand the scope of my work so far.  Thanks in advance for any help or
opinions.

Tod Thomas