Subject: RE: Unidentified subject! LDAP updates

From: "Lloyd, Alan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2000 17:18:01 +1000

Some LDAP servers may be fast - and may be its becuase they are memory based
DITS - But if they power fail with lots of updates in the tubes they may
corrrupt their DIT.. Other approaches may use DBs without any DB commitment.
Others (ours) uses RDB technology (with 32 world patents on it) with 2 phase
commit.. So is fast really fast but no integrity .... and is slow - because
it does the job correctly...really slow..

I bet a 747 can go faster if one took out the life rafts and the life
support systems, etc!!!

I look at this issue this way.. If I was building a global bank,  a carrier
V-ISP system, an auto makers on line system, a government infrastructure for
10s if not 100s of millions of global EC customers who use the directory
service to authenticate (as globally distributed users) in milliseconds at
the rates of thousands a second -  because that is my business - eg ON LINE
services for my authenticated customers..to my back end services...

I would want to use a highly scaleable, industry standard, distributed
directory infrastructure (not a set of servers where they replicate
everything and manually index some attributes) - This service would/does
hold maybe 200 attributes per user - such as certs, Vip status, service
profiles, etc, etc.. so as a business I would know everything about them as
they logged on - in terms of their service privileges and status. 

So is the choice with LDAP servers - have a really fast update system with
no system scale, capacity or integrity - because you time protocol
interactions - or do you want the same reliability of a distributed
information system as provided by traditional RDBs.. a system that you put
all your customer information in so you can authenticate them quickly,
globally and with update integrity  and get revenue for the best on line EC
service..

After all - the last thing any company wants to do is invest in a global
online EC service strategy and then get their three/ten million customers on
line - to then find the directory used - crashes and burns....

" I just spent twenty years growing my business to 20m customers... and when
I built my on line EC system for them with a cheap low integrity
directory... I lost them all in 10 seconds..."

Please consider...

Somethings are normally faster because they have left something out..eg
integrity..

ie do any of these "fast update tests" apply access controls, DIT schema and
structure tests,, ????

regards alan

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Wednesday, June 07, 2000 7:21 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Unidentified subject!

Greetings,

In general, due to the wide variety of database engine implementations on
which different LDAP
directories are based, it is safe to say that 'your mileage may vary'.  As
everyone has indicated,
update performance is related to all the extra things a directory server
might do as a result
of the modify operation.  What these things are is dependent upon the
underlying database
implementation upon which the directory is based.

Thus, some existing implementations may offer fast update performance while
others may not.

> Hi,
>
> I am working on a problem where LDAP would be used to keep a directory
with
> user data.  One concern I have is that LDAP is supposed to be less
efficient
> when it comes to intense write operations.
>
> Can LDAP handle millions of users data in a directory where some of the
data
> (a few attributes) needs to be updated very frequently?  How would that
> affect performance and is LDAP effective when the searched data must be
> returned prompty with very little delay?
>
> If anyone has any comments on this, I would appreciate it,
>
> Martin Rahm

Regards,
Tim Hahn

Internet: [email-masked]
Internal: Timothy Hahn/Endicott/IBM@IBMUS or IBMUSM00(HAHNT)
phone: 607.752.6388     tie-line: 8/852.6388
fax: 607.752.3681