Re: LDAP Interface

[Ben Ocean <linux@thewebsons.com>]

Well, that certainly answered the question! Thank you!
BenO

At 09:12 PM 7/2/02 -0500, you wrote:
>On July 2, 2002 at 09:10, Ben Ocean wrote:
>
> > >I do not know if LDAP would be efficient for this.  If you want
> > >to do fulltext searching, I would not recommend LDAP.  What kind
> > >of searching would you like to do?
> >
> > I presume it's called full text searching. The *standard* kind of 
> searching
> > one does on any search for discussion lists such as for python.org,
> > zope.org, etc.
>
>I wanted to be sure since some types of searching could be appropriate
>for LDAP.  For example, you could store mail header information in
>LDAP to provide queries for items like, "give me all messages from
>a given author."
>
> > I thought LDAP would be appropriate here because the data
> > doesn't change.
>
>But LDAP is not really designed to do full text searching.  LDAP's
>roots come from X.500 which is basically a standard for providing
>distributed directory services (address, organizations, etc).
>The directory service is not intended to support transactions or
>frequent modifications (but later X.500/LDAP implementations probably
>handle data modification fairly efficiently).  Read-only-based queries
>is where X.500/LDAP is supposed to be very efficient and optimized for.
>
> > Are you saying MySQL is more appropriate?
>
>It could be, and some users have requested they would like such
>a thing.  However, when it comes to full text retrieval, traditional
>RDBMS are not as efficient as full text search engines.  Reason in
>a nutshell: full text search engines index the data into structures
>(like hashes) to provide fast query results while RDBMS is basically
>doing a fancy grep wrt large text columns (which would be needed
>to store message body text).
>
>Companies like Oracle do provide some fill text indexing add-ons
>to their RDBMS, but I hear it takes some work to configure and
>may not be that mature.
>
>If you have a lot of computing resources, you could dump everything
>into a database and it can do all your searches.  But it will not
>scale well and will definitely not give you the performance of
>full text search engines.  You would also have to determine what
>you want to do with attachments (probably store file references to
>them instead of as blobs in the database), and since the text data
>of messsage bodies can be large, this could impact how you design
>your schema and overall database performance.
>
>Where RDBMS, or LDAP, can be very useful is in meta-based searches.
>For example, storing message header information like mentioned above
>to allow useful meta-based searches and dynamic archive navigation
>capabilites beyond the static ones provided by MHonArc.
>
>In newer versions of MHonArc, a minimal Perl API exists to allow
>something like this.  The API is documented in an appendix section
>of the documentation.  In a nutshell, you can create a callback
>function to take the message header data obtained from MHonArc,
>and store that information into a RDBMS using the Perl DBI modules,
>or if you like LDAP, you can use the Perl LDAP modules.
>
>--ewh
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>To sign-off this list, send email to majordomo@mhonarc.org with the
>message text UNSUBSCRIBE MHONARC-USERS


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To sign-off this list, send email to majordomo@mhonarc.org with the
message text UNSUBSCRIBE MHONARC-USERS