Re: RDBMS Backends & is ldap appropriate

[BarryJJ <BarryJJ@IBM.Net>]

From: Clayton Donley <donley@wwa.com>
Date: Wednesday, October 13, 1999 9:47 AM
...
>As for RDBMS as a back-end, there is very little reason why an RDBMS
>back-end WOULDN'T be suitable compared to BDB2 or other similar
physical
>datastores. ...

At the risk of showing my age, I remember when the common wisdom held
that a relational data base (RDB) would *never* be capable of supporting
online, real-time transaction processing, and would forever be doomed to
the role of what I guess we now call OLAP.

Even assuming a custom storage form will provide superior LDAP
performance, I wonder how many of us really need that level of
performance?

I suspect most businesses could justify the cost of a bit more hardware
to get satisfactory performance from an RDB-based LDAP service if the
advantage was a unified directory service.

At home, I'd love a single source that could be used by the email,
greeting card, word processor mail merge (esp. with the western holiday
season coming up :-), and even family tree software running on an
assortment of machines in a home network for myself, my spouse, and
whatever dependents.  If I could find something that supported just LDAP
and ODBC, I could make an enormous stride on this front.  Figured that
is more likely to come from an LDAP protocol running into an RDB than an
ODBC into a customised LDAP store ... but I wouldn't mind either way!!

Needless to say, Oracle have tweaked my interest although as far as I
can tell the LDAP support is one of many touted Oracle8i features - iFS,
integrated web server, and integrated Java engine being others - that
have yet to appear in any of the so-called Oracle8i releases to date.

Barry - BarryJJ@IBM.Net