Virtual Identity Dialogue

A nice comment from my earlier post:

Rave (a very cool name! writes):
"Hi, Nice Blog! I am a newbie to OIM. What I understood from your post is that I am suprised to hear that OID can be used to virtualise LDAP data.... Is it similar to what we call integration of different LDAP directories? If yes.. then how is it virtual? Because what ever changes you make to one like e-directory (when import is used to integrate with OID) the same changes are reflected in OID."

First Rave - I'm glad you like the blog.

Second - It's a fair question. I had intended to use the blog post to help see how the message sounded so that I could clarify it.

While OID acts more like a "traditional" LDAP server (that is it primarily is about storing data as LDAP as opposed to fetching it from existing repositories on demand) - it does so using SQL calls to a database. This is a different approach to traditional flat-file database approach. In particular because OID leverages Oracle DB - OID avoids the scalability and data management problems the old flat-file storage-based LDAP servers face.

So if you are facing a problem where you need to store some data into an LDAP server *and* you want to have that data stored in an Oracle Database - as opposed to exposing *existing* database data as LDAP - then OID is a better solution.