Re: LDAP vs. Relational

[Steven Augart <swa@ISI.EDU>]

Depending on the frequency of use of this database, it may well make more
sense to run a nightly job that automagically copies the RDBMS data to your
LDAP server, and then use the LDAP server to serve up the data to the
clients that read it through LDAP.  Pure LDAP servers are optimized to serve
up LDAP data; the LDAP API to the RDBMS will not be as efficient.

You would want to justify this by stress-testing the two LDAP servers (RDBMS
gateway and pure LDAP server) with the expected load, of course, and showing
that there is some significant difference (faster response time, less
expensive hardware required, or something similar).

--Steve Augart
USC/Information Sciences Institute, Globus Project

Tod Thomas wrote:

> 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?