LDAP Directory Technology Review

The schema architectural guidelines that developers must follow when working with LDAP directories enforce strict data integrity rules, as certain data need to be stored in different physical servers and used by different applications. The Directory Information Tree (DIT), provided that the appropriate design principles are followed, can enforce data integrity rules which must be followed each time a record is updated.

Only a specific kind of structure is allowed in LDAP (Brian Arkills, 2002). The replication features of LDAP Directories offer increased security against data corruption, hardware failures or problems occurring during updates.

Bruce Greenblatt argues that the data normalisation methods employed by designers of RDBMSs can also be applied on the design of Directories, thus avoiding any data integrity problems which may arise by wrong design decisions.

These three rules of normalization (first, second and third normal form) can be applied to LDAP schema design in order to eliminate some of the common problems. In order to apply the normalization rules to LDAP schema design, simply replace table in the rules with object class, replace primary key with relative distinguished name (RDN), and replace cell with attribute value. (Bruce Greenblatt, 2002).