Re: Datawarehouse vs LDAP

[mark@mjwilcox.com]

LDAP is designed to provide quick search access to data over an 
open standard network protocol. Data Warehouses are designed to 
allow you to explore various relationships in your organization, 
which may or may not be quick & it's definitely not over a standard 
protocol (at least not one that I know of). 


Basically you can sum it up with you need both. Or as I explained 
to someone recently, LDAP fits into 3 areas:

1) Email/White Page services. A standard way to provide access 
to your corporate directory. Either internally and/or externally. 
Network Solutions is now exploring using LDAP to use as the 
mechanism to manage their WhoIs database.

2) User Authentication -- It's the protocol du-jour for providing the 
backend of single-signon. If you want to use PKI, it's a must. 

3) Network Resources Management -- Managing printers, system 
privileges, under Java 2, you can even use LDAP to manage your 
remote objects like in RMI or EJB.

Perhaps another way to look at it:

Data warehouse will allow you to explore where you customers live, 
which store they bought the most stuff from in relation to where 
they lived and discover any characteristics that all customers 
share. 

You can use LDAP to disover email addresses of the customers to 
spam them once you've figured out your new marketing message 
derived from the data in the warehouse.

 (hope that's not too lame, i've been on the road all week and I'm 
getting tired :). 

Finally I'll also plug my book "Implementing LDAP".


Also I'll refer you to this:
http://www.messagingdirect.com/publications/IC-6055.html

which is a paper entitled:
Combining Directories and Relational Databases in the Enterprise

Messaging Direct has been at this for a while (even back to X.500). 
It's probably the most susinct answer. 


Mark

On 31 Oct 00, at 23:47, Rich Goodwin wrote:

> 
> 
> I need to start a FAQ-type list for a customer.  I suspect/expect someone to ask - why use LDAP when we populate it with data extracted form the datawarehouse?  My initial reaction is datawarehouses are for large data pulls and LDAP is for small quick & simple transactions.  I'm sure there are 
links/sources for something along this path ... can anyone point me in the right direction?
> 
> Rich
> 
> Rich Goodwin
> Advanced Concepts, Inc.
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> 7918 Jones Branch Drive
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> McLean, VA 22102
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> 
> 
> 


Mark Wilcox
mark@mjwilcox.com
Got LDAP?