Re: [OT] RDBMS and LDAP wars

[Jon Roberts <jon@mentata.com>]

Hanasaki JiJi wrote:
> Planning to use LDAP for storing orgchart and physical building/room 
> heirarchies.

Design tips: Put the all people in one node of your directory hierarchy 
(e.g. ou=People, dc=foo, dc=com) and model the organization with a tree 
of ou entries. Link the people to the ou's they work under and the 
buildings/rooms they habitate using the standard inetorgperson 
attributes. In most organizations, buildings don't tend to move around 
like people do!

> The DBA folks are touting NO LDAP DO IT IN RDBMS because:

Because they are DBAs :)

>     - LDAP has no referential integrity
>     - moving trees/branches is not possible
>     - no ACID transactions
>     - no reporting tools like Crystal reports

As Howard Chu pointed out, #2 and #4 are basically wrong. #1 and #3 can 
be accomplished at the application layer. Referential integrity is even 
built onto some commercial directory server products (e.g. a plug-in to 
Sun ONE). As easy as LDAP makes it to express and backup data, I don't 
know why you need a whole bunch of rollback capabilities for anyway, 
especially with an application like this.

> Anyone have wisdom on dealing with this?  Something like a "rules of 
> thumb" or "best practices" for what goes in a RDBMS vs LDAP and how they 
> should could be used together in complimentary roles?

For arguing the LDAP side, check out:

http://www.mentata.com/ldaphttp/why/ldap.htm

I would recommend LDAP for your operational databases and RDBMS for 
things like data warehousing.

Jon Roberts
www.mentata.com