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LDAP vs. Relational
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