Re: What exactly does "backend" mean?

[David Wright <ichbin@shadlen.org>]

> If the front end of MySQL cannot access an LDAP directory with a MySQL 
> backend (albeit without actually going through LDAP) what good is using 
> a MySQL backend?  Doesn't that seem counter-intuitive?

You could speak SQL to an SQL-backend directly using on the SQL server's 
port, just not via the LDAP server.

If you do this, access to the SQL DB should be read-only, since OpenLDAP 
assumes that no one is messing with its data while it isn't looking. You 
might also be able to get away with making LDAP access read-only and 
making all changes via SQL; this might work, I'm not sure.

I think you will find that not many people run SQL backends to LDAP 
servers. That is in part because of these limitations. It is also 
because relational and object-oriented database are optomized for rather 
different tasks.

I do not run such a setup. If you are interested in setting one up, I'd 
ask on the OpenLDAP list if anyone does.