Re: advantages of ldap over dbms

[Mark W. <mew...@un...>]

You can't really say what is the difference between LDAP and a database
because LDAP is a species of database. What you probably mean is "why use
LDAP when I have a relational database"?

The most basic difference is that a directory server is  a
specialized database designed to provide fast searches. While a relational
database is optimized for transactions (where a series of operations is
counted as 1, thus if one of the steps fails, the RDBMS can roll-back to
the state it was in before you started).

Directories also typically are hierarchical in nature (RBBMS is typically
flat, but you can implement a hierachy using tables and queries),
networkable, distributed and replicated. 

LDAP provides an open-standard to a directory service. 

Typically we use LDAP for email directories (all popular email clients
provide an LDAP client now) and authorization services (authentication and
access control). 

Yes you could use an RDBMS for these types of queries but there's not a
set standard, in particular over TCP/IP to connect to databases over the
network. There's language specific protocols (like Perl's DBI and Java's
JDBC) that hide this problem behind an API abstraction, but that's not a
replacment for a standard access protocol.

And we're also starting to see LDAP eat up from the bottom on roles
traditionally played by RDBMS in terms of general data management because
it's easier to setup an LDAP server (once you understand the basic
nomenclature) and you don't need a DBA to write your queries AND more
importantly all LDAP servers speak the same essential protocol, thus you
don't have to fuss with your database driver trying to connect it to the
Internet. Once you have an LDAP server up and running, it'a automatically
available over the 'net. And it's possible to connect to it from a variety
of mechanisms, including just about every possible programming language.

hope that helps,

Mark


On 10 Oct 2000, Darren/Torin/Who Ever... wrote:

> ritu rani jaiswal, in an immanent manifestation of deity, wrote:
> >I am new to ldap. Can you please let me know the advantages of ldap over
> >using a database.
> 
> Well, it really depends on what you want to do. LDAP can't do
> everything.  But if you are looking for information retrieval where
> there are a lot more reads than writes, try:
> <URL:http://www.openldap.org/faq/data/cache/378.html>.
> 
> Darren
>