Tutorial: LDAP Directory Services - Just Another Database Application? Shridhar Shukla and Anand Deshpande Return to Tutorial Sessions Abstract The key driving force behind general-purpose enterprise directory services is for providing a central repository for commonly and widely used information such as users, groups, network service access information and profiles, security information, etc. Acceptance of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) as an access protocol has facilitated widespread integration of these directory services into the network infrastructure and applications. Both directory and relational databases are data repositories sharing the characteristic that they have mechanisms for dealing with schema and structure of information and are suitable for systematically organized data. This tutorial describes characteristics of directories such as schema information, query language and support, storage mechanisms required, typical requirements imposed by applications, etc. We then explain the differences between a directory and relational database, and show how the two are required to co-exist in a typical enterprise. An essential characteristic assumed for information stored in directories is that it is relatively static and that the queries are mostly read only. We describe typical directory applications to validate this assumption and project the requirements imposed on them as these applications evolve. We then describe areas of overlap between traditional databases and directories, describe some database and directory integration solutions adopted in the market, and identify areas in which directory deployment can benefit from the experience gathered by the database community. BIBTEX @inproceedings{DBLP:conf/sigmod/ShuklaD00,   author    = {Shridhar Shukla and                 Anand Deshpande},    editor    = {Weidong Chen and                 Jeffrey F. Naughton and                 Philip A. Bernstein},    title     = {Tutorial: LDAP Directory Services - Just Another Database Application?},    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on                 Management of Data, May 16-18, 2000, Dallas, Texas, USA},    journal   = {SIGMOD Record},    publisher = {ACM},    volume    = {29},    number    = {2},    year      = {2000},    isbn      = {1-58113-218-2},    pages     = {580},    crossref  = {DBLP:conf/sigmod/2000},    bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de} } }, DiSC'01 Copyright ©2002 ACM Inc.