Understanding Oracle Unified Directory: OUD: Overview: Introduction

In this blog post, I will focus on  Oracle Unified Directory (OUD), its main features and advantages, different servers and more.

For getting high level overview of all the different directory services offered by Oracle, refer here.

OUD 11g is a part of the Oracle Directory Services Plus (ODS Plus) suite. The ODS Plus suite also includes OVD, OID and ODSEE.

Now a days, Oracle is recommending OUD for Directory services solution for all new development and new deployments. Why ?

a) OUD is purely based on JAVA which simplifies multiplatform support, deployment, and ongoing maintenance.

b)  OUD  together with Oracle Virtual Directory (OVD) and Oracle Directory Integration Platform (DIP), provides unified directory services and uniquely combines proxy, virtual directory, meta-directory and data storage capabilities. Basically all the main requirements (listed below) of an Enterprise Directory can be achieved by using above combination. OUD is a ALL-IN-ONE Directory Solution.

• Directory storage – OUD uses an embedded Oracle Berkeley Database Java Edition instance for data storage. Optimizations to this storage engine provide OUD 11g with a very high level of performance.

• Directory proxy – OUD supports load balancing & failover.

• Data distribution component with a global index – OUD support data distribution, and global index.

• Directory synchronization – OUD can run as an independent thread in the same process as the directory server, or can run in its own process.

• Virtual directory – OVD works with OUD 11g to provide directory virtualization. It provides a single point of contact for identity data regardless of where the data resides, giving you a unified view of data stored in OUD, other LDAP directory servers, databases and web services in real-time without requiring additional synchronization.

The unified solution provides architecture flexibility and optimization, accelerates identity management projects and application deployments, and reduces total cost of ownership.

c) OUD provides a large improvement over ODSEE 11g performance.  Compared to ODSEE, OUD provided 3 times READ performance and 5 times WRITE performance. OUD has been benchmarked at over 200K operations per second for read and write operations.

Scalability and Performance
Scales up to tens of billions of users and devices
Optimized for cloud, mobile, and social computing
Scales up in both monolithic and horizontal deployments
Fewer broadcasts required in horizontally distributed environment
Scales down to development environments for experimentation and demonstration

d) There are four types of servers in OUD :-

Type os Server	Highlights
Directory Servers	1) Directory servers are mainly responsible for Persistence of data, serving client requests and forwarding changes to specific replication servers
Replication Servers	1) Replication servers are responsible for: • Managing connections from directory servers • Connecting to other replication servers • Listening for connections from other replication servers • Receiving changes from directory servers • Forwarding changes to directory servers and to other replication servers • Saving changes to stable storage, which includes trimming older operations
Proxy Servers	1) Proxy server does not store any data but instead routes LDAP requests from clients to directory servers that are deployed in a directory services topology. 2) It is the entry point to a directory service deployment spread over multiple directory servers and, perhaps, multiple data centers. 3) The OUD 11g proxy server can forward requests to any LDAP v3-compliant directory server for eg ODSEE or OID or OUD. 4) OUD proxy server can be configured either for load balancing or data distribution, or both.
Replication Gateways	1) Replication gateway facilitates upgrading existing ODSEE 11g deployments to OUD 11g. This enables you to run OUD 11g and ODSEE 11g in parallel in a mixed environment, so that you can transition to OUD 11g over time, validate your upgrade strategy application by application, and most importantly, upgrade without downtime. 2) It translates and propagates the replication information between ODSEE 11g directory servers and OUD 11g directory servers. 3)The OUD 11g replication gateway service change synchronization in both directions and adapts as needed.

In next blog, I will cover Installation and Configuration of OUD.

[Updated]: Refer here for Blog on Installation of OUD and ODSM

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