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LDAP-RDBM Database Integration

Challenge
It is not uncommon in an enterprise environment to have various storage silos of different types, and frequently these may contain different overlapping identity information about a single user. While working with homogenous data storage systems is tricky enough, integrating completely different data storage systems is very complicated. To begin with, your applications will need to be able to communicate with systems using a variety of different protocols and will need to support different query languages as well. Needless to say that your applications will need numerous configuration options to allow you to add multiple datasources.

Creating a single point of access for all of your data systems, that is able to communicate using a common protocol and query language is a massive leap forward in handling many database integration problems.

Solution

Symlabs Virtual Directory Server includes an LDAP-RDBMS Bridge, which allows you to connect a relational database to your solution as a normal datasource. The LDAP-RDBMS Bridge transforms LDAP requests into SQL queries that your database can understand, and will transform the results returned for a sql query into an LDAP-friendly search result. Database tables can be attached to virtual branches within the LDAP tree, and fields within a database table can be presented as attributes for each entry in the database. This means that LDAP client applications can interact with a relational database as if it was a native LDAP Directory.

Adding a backend database servergroup is as simple as completing a click-through wizard in the GUI configuration tool and selecting the database type that you wish to add. The wizard will guide you through each configuration step, until you have attached a table to your LDAP tree as a virtual branch. Once the backend database has been configured, you can add as many tables to your configuration as you require.

It is worthwhile noting that during the configuration process, you define a naming attribute and an optional password attribute. This is because the LDAP-RDBMS Bridge can help to facilitate BIND authentication using a database backend, allowing LDAP clients to authenticate against user credentials stored in a relational database.

The LDAP-RDBMS Bridge can integrate most of the commonly used database systems around today, and also includes full ODBC support to allow it to function in nearly any environment. The plugin handles the transformation of requests in real-time, ensuring that the data that you are working with is always up to date, and you have no synchronization or replication issues.

Using the LDAP-to-RDBMS Bridge in conjunction with a Virtual Tree or the many of the other bundled plugins in the Virtual Directory Server's arsenal, will resolve many of the most complex integration issues, with minimal expertise required.