LDAP Directory Technology Review

Perhaps the most important limitation experienced during the implementation stage about directory technology was the inability to authenticate to the MySQL database server through the Directory Server. This is an issue which MySQL AB does not intend to resolve soon, unless there is demand from their existing customer base.

Directory servers are optimised for data retrieval performance and can be much faster on this than a traditional RDBMS. However, there are limitations on how the schema is to be designed in order for the system to achieve such performance, with the general rule being that the query needs to “travel” as less as possible through the Directory Information Tree (DIT) for faster result retrieval.

Brian Arkills argues that the way synonymous names are handled when there are several child LDAP installations can cause integration problems.

Additionally, LDAP Directories are lacking transactional support, which is due to the fact that all the indexed attributes need to be re-indexed when a new record is entered. Therefore any parts of the system, which require a transactional environment to operate, need to be implemented using a RDBMS and the data can then be imported into the OpenLDAP overnight or whenever the server load is relatively small.