Why Choose LDAP?

Many database systems are available, so why choose an LDAP database? Without going into great lengths to examine all of the possibilities, here are some reasons for choosing LDAP versus other database or X.500 (DAP) products:

• Two well known and publicly available LDAP packages are LDAP-3.3[6] from the University of Michigan (UMich) and OpenLDAP-1.2.x[15] from the OpenLDAP Project.
• Netscape V3/V4 Directory Server is a good commercial implementation of an enhanced/updated UMich LDAP-3.3, which provides another good LDAP source that closely follows the open (IETF) LDAP standards
• some X.500/DAP servers are not user-extensible, which is not a limitation of X.500/DAP per se, but of the particular implementations. The LDAP implementations mentioned in this paper are all user-extensible. Where a given X.500/DAP server is user-extensible, then it may be used in place of an LDAP server.
• LDAP compliance and compatibility is appearing in more and more user and networking software
• in many cases, a proprietary interface is not needed to access an LDAP database, as is true with at least some commercial database systems and some commercialized X.500/DAP databases which require a specialized access client program that works only with that particular system
• LDAP is oftentimes a lightweight database well suited for simple, lightweight, data storage that is easily accessible by many Internet-based applications; this at least partly implies that a large database system is not needed, though one could probably be used; it should be noted, however, that there have been some very large LDAP databases implemented
• data inquiries are relatively simple, especially when compared to some types of commercial database systems
• methods developed to access an LDAP database are not limited to one particular language or compiler
• as more Internet-based applications become LDAP compatible, they will increase the number of applications that can be easily integrated with other Internet-based applications using common data in an LDAP server
• LDAP provides a fairly nice data structure that lends itself well to organizing certain types of data, most of which relates to people, processes, organizations, and services
• LDAP databases are easily extendable in their data types and data structure
• small to medium sized LDAP servers can be implemented on small to medium sized computers quite easily, which may seem trivial until compared with the size of machines dedicated for large database systems
• LDAP can be implemented on commercial computer systems or free UNIX-like systems, which may lead to sizable cost benefits