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I often hear things like "Can we load our employee info using LDAP?" Yet, the title "Lightweight Directory Access Protocol" makes me think of it as a protocol rather than a physical database management system like Oracle or MSSQL.
So could someone please explain to me what LDAP is, how it's used, and how it basically works? Is LDAP simply a standard protocol for extracting data from a variety of DBMSs? In an architecture diagram, would LDAP be simply an arrow drawn between the DB and the application server?
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Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP, is a software protocol that stores and arranges data to make it easily searchable. The data can be any information about organizations, devices, or users stored in directories. LDAP is the protocol used by servers to speak with on-premise directories.
What is LDAP? LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is an open and cross platform protocol used for directory services authentication. LDAP provides the communication language that applications use to communicate with other directory services servers.
LDAP is Still Very Much Alive Although LDAP may not to be quite as popular as it once was, it is still a mainstay. LDAP is still often the protocol of choice for many open source technical solutions—think Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, and thousands of others.
Basically, LDAP helps organizations store sensitive user information and enables people in the same organization to access passwords within their network.
LDAP is a protocol for querying user directories. For example, Active Directory or Novell eDirectory both support LDAP. It is also, to a degree a syntax for doing such queries, like how SQL is a querying language for querying databases.
An LDAP command could look like
(givenName=Mike)
And it would return all Mikes in the directory.
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