DIRECTORY SERVICES


Condensed Directory Catalogs
You create a condensed Directory Catalog from the Directory Catalog template (DIRCAT5.NTF). Condensed Directory Catalogs are designed to be small enough to fit on IBM® Lotus® Notes clients. For example, an organization can have several IBM® Lotus® Domino® directories that together contain more than 350,000 users and total 3GB in size. When these directories are aggregated in a condensed Directory Catalog, it is likely to be only about 50MB. In general, each user and group entry is slightly more than 100 bytes. Condensed directory catalog are designed primarily for use on Notes clients.

To achieve its small size, a condensed Directory Catalog uses a unique design that combines multiple documents from the Domino Directories into single documents in the directory catalog, and that limits the number of sorted views available for lookups.

Aggregate documents

One reason a condensed Directory Catalog is small is it combines many entries from the source Domino Directories into single aggregate documents. A single Directory Catalog aggregate document can contain up to 250 source directory entries, although on average the maximum is about 200. This means that a condensed Directory Catalog needs to use only about 1000 aggregate documents to store information from 200,000 documents in the source Domino Directories.

Limited number of views

A condensed Directory Catalog is also small because it contains only a few, small views. By contrast a Domino Directory and an Extended Directory Catalog have multiple, typically large views.


Design changes

In general, you should not change the database design of a condensed Directory Catalog. One exception is changing the name of the Users view; you can change the name of this view, as long as you keep the original view name, Users, as an alias.

Application access

Notes applications can use these methods to access a condensed Directory Catalog programmatically:


*Can access the Users view but not the $Users view.

In addition, LDAP applications can search a condensed Directory Catalog used by a server that runs the LDAP service.

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