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Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2006 10:07:15 -0500
From: "George Stoianov" <gstoyanoff@gmail.com>
To: dev@directory.apache.org
Subject: Database information back end
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Hi,

I read a thread on the possibility of having a database back end for
ADS and have tried to understand all the arguements pro and con and I
think I am on cross roads regarding the philosophical and design
aspects of the whole idea :) (leaning towards an rdbms aren't you
using BerkleyDB??), but still as a person that has/is using databases
for many other things I see some benefits to be had if you could
enable at least the presentation of database data in response to ldap
queries.

One major drawback of ldap compared to a relation storage architecture
is that it is not relational in database terms it is more of a network
type of database structure where the information for each node of data
is stored at the node level and the uniqueness is guaranteed by the
path i.e. if I have a person that belongs to two different
departements I would have to create two records for that person and
all the common data would be duplicated in order to have that person
access the different resources for the other department. I know that
if you could possibly put all the requirements down you could get a
good enough structure to account for that but flexibility in the long
term seems a lot harder to attain that with an rdbms engine, although
I like the trigger and view capabilities you are building they maybe
the solution. I am completely new to ldap so please correct me if I am
wrong.

I am currently in the processes of helping with the implementaion of a
solution that uses ldap for user credentials, those credentials are
also used to form groups of people based on database records that
experiences frequent updates and changes so I am looking for a
flexible and quick in respect of updates/deletes solution and was
really happy to find ADS as I thought that maybe/is the answer???

So let me get to my question: Is there a place in the ADS API where I
could plug in another representation of a storage structure which I
then will inadvertantly tie to a rdbms back end. What I need is the
power and the standards compliance from ADS and the ability to serve
my own data from a different source. Can you please point me in the
right direction on this??

Thanks,
George