LDAP Powered Photo Gallery?

[r yunan]

Anybody try one of these before?

I need to build a gallery website that serves image media in various forms
and groupings, and thought LDAP would work well for data access.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to find much documentation on using LDAP
as a binary data store (rather, examples are mostly about simple
authentication and email). So, I have a few questions for the experts:

Background: The objective is to serve not only photos, and videos, but also
sequences of photos to be delivered as an ordered array of images (i.e. a
series of still frames from a video clip). The media files are grouped by
several topical and functional contexts (e.g. type, date, location, subject,
etc.) and may have relationships to other groups of files.

My questions involve schema and application design.
I've heard about performance loss from using large binary files and LDAP, is
this going to be an issue for me?
If so, what would be the best desired alternative for the binary files? SQL
database? Web DAV? Other?

If I do use LDAP, when storing the image sequences, is it better to store
each image separately and add an indexing attribute, or to try and pack the
whole set together in order as an array (in one object, let's call it a
'clip'). I wonder about this, again, as a performance issue and whether
retrieving an array is much faster than a set of items.

Of course, I have to store other things besides the media and directly
related data, such as tables of locations or people. This may sound naive,
but just because the data is stored as LDIF, does not mean I have to
dispense with relational thinking in my design, right? Can't I view an arc
in my data tree as the same basic concept as a table? (With no practice, I
still doubt my understanding of the documentation).

Lastly, when designing my identification scheme, there is a temptation to
use meaningful (to humans) text and key identifiers from other items as the
components of the DN. How important is it to use independent identifiers
(like autoincremented or random, as used in relational systems), or is it
more preferred to include meaning into the design when using LDAP?

Thanks for your advice,

Ramsey

[Marcel Cox]

r,

You posted to a dead newsgroup which is no longer part of the official
Novell support hierarchy.
I suggest you visit http://support.novell.com/forums and post to one
of the official Novell support forums.

Marcel