Ole, feel free to fix any bad english on the site, no need to ask ;)
Personally I prefer:
[SUGGESTION] Partitions contain mutually exclusive sets of entries.
Well, they are not mutually exclusive : they may only differ by their
DN. You may store the same entry in two different places, as you can
copy a file in two different directories on your disk. The DN/Path with
simply be different.
In ApacheDS a set of entries
forming a directory tree
is contained in partition.
The root of the directory tree is the partition.
No. A partition is not the root of a directory tree. A partition is
like a mounted file system
If a file system is mounted at the root so that all files in the file
system are visible, then is it the same?
No, because there is no such thing as a root in Ldap, only what we call
a rootDSE, which is a very special beast : it's the place where the
server stores internal informations, like supported controls, and naming
contexts. I was not clear in my answer though. What I meant was that a
Partition is the DIT itself, and the partition's name is associated with
an entry which DN is the partition name. This entry will be the root of
the DIT, represented and implemented as this partition.
It sounds like a partition could be a proxy to an entry in an other
directory. So the proxy would point to an entry that is not at the
root of the directory tree that contains the entry, and in this case
the partition would not be the root of the real directory tree?
A partition is really a simple thing : it represents a DIT, with all its
entry, and it has a name which is the namingContext. No need to try to
find other words for that. It's like a table is a table, and a chair is
a chair ...
Although from the point of view of the DirContext attaching to
ApacheDS's partition y, partition y is the root right? We can't
go any higher than y?
I don't understand why you mention DirContext here ? A DirContext is
just a context associated to an entry. (just have a look at JNDI
tutorial (http://java.sun.com/products/jndi/tutorial/) where DirContext
is clearly defined).
If you want to know if we can reduce a partition's name to somwhere
shorter, the answer is no. You also have to define clearly what 'higher'
means. As the DN RDNs are written in the opposite direction, compared to
Linux paths, for 'a=x, b=y, c=z', then is 'b=y, c=z' higher or lower
than 'a=x, b=y, c=z' ?
Or will ApacheDS enable hopping above the entry y, with retrieval of
other entries from the parents of entry y?
What is 'entry y' ? just an entry somewhere in the DIT?
ApacheDS comes with 3 partitions (Also referred to as partition
suffixes) by default:
cn=schema
ou=system
dc=example, dc=org
Are these all the root of their corresponding directory tree?
Yes, definitively.
Emmanuel
