Introduction to Directory Server20 Netscape Directory Server Deployment Guide • October 2004You can choose to use multiple databases to support your Directory Server. Youcan distribute your data across the databases, allowing the server to hold moredata than can be stored in a single database.The following sections describe how a directory database stores data.About Directory EntriesLDIF is a standard text-based format for describing directory entries. An entry is agroup of lines in the LDIF file that contains information about an object, such as aperson in your organization or a printer on your network. Information about theentry is represented in the LDIF file by a set of attributes and their values. Eachentry has an object class attribute that specifies the kind of object the entrydescribes and defines the set of additional attributes it contains. Each attributedescribes a particular trait of an entry.For example, an entry might be of an object class organizationalPerson,indicating that the entry represents a person within a particular organization.This object class allows the givenname and telephoneNumber attributes. Thevalues assigned to these attributes give the name and phone number of theperson represented by the entry.Directory Server also uses read-only attributes that are calculated by the server.These attributes are called operational attributes. There are also some operationalattributes that can be set by the administrator, for access control and other serverfunctions.Entries are stored in a hierarchical structure in the directory tree. In LDAP, youcan query an entry and request all entries below it in the directory tree. Thissubtree is called the base distinguished name, or base DN. For example, if youmake an LDAP search request specifying a base DN of ou=people,dc=example,dc=com, then the search operation examines only the ou=peoplesubtree in the dc=example,dc=com directory tree.NOTE For database files that are larger than 2Gbytes, the machine must beconfigured to support large files.You can do this by choosing largefile on Solaris and vxfsfilesystem with largefiles option on HP UX. Linux handleslarge files without having to configure the filesystem.
