Re: Newbie question

["Dmitry Kovalev" <mitya@seismic.geol.msu.ru>]

Hello!

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ana Cruz Martín" <anacm@tdi.tudistrito.es>
To: <openldap-general@OpenLDAP.org>
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2001 2:17 PM
Subject: RV: Newbie question


> Hi everybody:
>
> I have a question that may sound too newbie, but I have been searching
> information about this and I haven't found anything clear.
>
> The thing is that I'm working on local phone directories, accesible via
web.
> By now, we are using a relational database, but we are thinking of
migrating
> it to an LDAP directory. The problem is that don't know exactly if it is
> possible or even a good idea. Our main doubt is related to the number of
> readings vs. writings of the data: we know we have quite a few accesses to
> our web, but we usually include a lot of new data on the database
everyweek.
> Is a good idea using an LDAP directory then?

I'd say that it would be a good idea to have such data accessible through
LDAP, as more and more applications expect it to be LDAP-accessible.
This does not necesserily mean that you should migrate your database to LDAP
at all, though there is something to consider.

When it is said that LDAP is not very good at writing, _really_ massive
real-time writing is meant (that is, writing that happens constantly due to
application needs). It is not the same that adding many records every week
(or every day) in background, so there is no problem here at all.

But you can come to alternative decision, namely - continue to use RDBMS,
but make the data from there accessible not only through the web (using
cgi,asp or whatever you do use), but through LDAP also - using OpenLDAP
back-sql, for instance.
This is especially interesting if you have applications that already access
this data through RDBMS - you will have single source of information, no
need to synchronize anything.

WBW, Dmitry