Reasons to store users' data in LDAP instead of RDBMS

Question

It is often said that using LDAP is a good way to store data about users. That\'s beacause users\' \"directory\" is hierarchical and it changes rarely. But in my opinion tha

Answer 1

Interoperability.

LDAP directories have a standard schema to represent a user, so common fields such as first name, last name and email address will be consistently named across different directory implementations. This is not the case with an RDBMS.

LDAP defines both the communication protocol and the query language. Compare this to SQL which is only a query language and each RDBMS implements its own communication protocol.

So there are many, many applications that can simply 'plug-in' to an LDAP directory as a user store, allowing you to centralise user management. (Of course, there are still compatibility issues between directory implementations, but these pale in comparison to having users stored in separate databases for each app).