ldb

ldb is a LDAP-like embedded database. It is not at all LDAP standards compliant, so if you want a standards compliant database then please see the excellent OpenLDAP project.

What ldb does is provide a fast database with an LDAP-like API designed to be used within an application. In some ways it can be seen as a intermediate solution between key-value pair databases and a real LDAP database.

ldb is the database engine used in Samba4.

Features

The main features that separate ldb from other solutions are:

Safe multi-reader, multi-writer, using byte range locking
LDAP-like API
fast operation
choice of local tdb or remote LDAP backends
integration with talloc
schema-less operation, for trivial setup
modules for extensions (such as schema support)
easy setup of indexes and attribute properties
LDIF for import/export
ldbedit tool for database (via LDIF) editing (reminiscent of 'vipw')

Documentation

Currently ldb is completely lacking in programmer or user documentation. This is your opportunity to make a contribution! Start with the public functions declared in ldb.h and the example code in the tools directory. Documentation in the same docbook format used by Samba would be preferred.

Discussion and bug reports

ldb does not currently have its own mailing list or bug tracking system. For now, please use the samba-technical mailing list or the ldb mailing list, and the Samba bugzilla bug tracking system.

Download

You can download the latest release either via rsync or through git.

To fetch via git see the following guide:
Using Git for Samba Development
Once you have cloned the tree switch to the v4-0-test branch and cd into the source/lib/ldb directory.

To fetch via rsync use these commands:

  rsync -Pavz samba.org::ftp/unpacked/ldb .
  rsync -Pavz samba.org::ftp/unpacked/tdb .
  rsync -Pavz samba.org::ftp/unpacked/talloc .
  rsync -Pavz samba.org::ftp/unpacked/libreplace .

and build in ldb. It will find the other libraries in the directory above automatically.

Andrew Tridgell
ldb AT tridgell.net