Debora Jean Byrne

An enterprise directory solution with DB2

LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is a technology that can provide directory services to a range of applications. Directory service, a critical part of distributed computing, is the central point where network services, security services, and applications can form an integrated distributed computing environment. The simplicity of LDAP enables users to store and retrieve data easily from the directory. Nevertheless, as the use of directory services becomes more widespread, directories will need to scale to support millions of entries and millions of user requests with subsecond predictable performance. LDAP directories can be implemented using various storage mechanisms such as flat files, b-trees, or databases. This paper discusses an implementation of LDAP that uses the IBM DATABASE 2TM relational database as the data store and query engine to meet the directory service requirements. Performance analysis is provided to show that a relational database can be used to successfully meet the performance and scale needs of an LDAP directory while remaining secure and competitive with other vendor implementations.