Concurrency Control and Recovery on Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

摘要

In this paper we provide a concurrency control and recovery (CCR) mechanism over cached LDAP objects. An LDAP server can be directly queried using system calls to retrieve data. Existing LDAP implementations do not provide CCR mechanisms. In such cases, it is up to the application to verify that accesses remain serialized. Our mechanism provides an independent layer over an existing LDAP server (Sun One Directory Server), which handles all user requests, serializes them based on 2 Phase Locking and Timestamp Ordering mechanisms and provides XML-based logging for recovery management. Furthermore, while current LDAP servers only provide object-level locking, our scheme serializes transactions on individual attributes of LDAP objects (attribute-level locking). We have developed a Directory Enabled Network (DEN) Simulator that operates on a subset of directory objects on an existing LDAP server to test the proposed mechanism. We perform experiments to show that our mechanism can gracefully address concurrency and recovery related issues over an LDAP server.