Last night (okay… i’m posting thsi a bit later… so the other night), a group of us gathered around to hear about some work that had been done in getting a MySQL Cluster backend for OpenLDAP.

I’d heard a bit of rumors (where rumors is defined by somebody saying something on IRC and me being busy looking at other things) about this previously, but last night was the first time I a) saw it working and b) saw performance numbers.

Disclaimer: I am no LDAP expert.

So, what is it?

Normal LDAP can replicate asynchronously from one machine to another. You can even update on both and it has some conflict resolution. But… this costs in performance.

Normal LDAP can also replicate (asynchronously) to a remote location for read-only (e.g. make authentication go faster in Australia with the main LDAP server in the US).

The MySQL Cluster backend for OpenLDAP connects directly to MySQL Cluster, using rather optimised schema, indexes and coding (directly using everything that we’re good at – which was really awesome to hear).

So, the MySQL Cluster backed LDAP server is the 2nd fastest in the world. The fastest is OpenLDAP on a single machine. With MySQL Cluster, we’re not that much slower than a single box – but we have redundancy. So that’s totally awesome. The third fastest…. much slower than us.

This was one of the most awesome new things I’ve seen here.