Conclusion

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In this chapter, we have seen a number of interesting distributed architectures for data maintenance. The previous chapters assumed that there is only one directory holding all the data in our enterprise. However, life is rarely so simple. There are many situations where it makes sense to divide the directory over more than one server, assigning each of these directory servers the responsibility for one part of the directory information tree. The user, however, should be able to get the whole picture, retrieving information held on the different directory servers as if the data was held on a single server.

We furthermore have seen how to replicate data from the directory on other directory servers. There are many reasons to replicate a directory, including availability, performance, and administrative issues.

We also learned how to integrate data from different sources into a directory server to form one unique architecture using metadirectories.

The last part of this chapter showed how to use the markup language XML and the directory standard LDAP, thus allowing access to your directory via XML. The advantage of this technique is that applications developed in XML have the ability to use the enterprise directory without the need of an LDAP-enabled client.

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