LDAP is an acronym that stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.
Oracle is beginning to support and use LDAP. Release 8.1.6 contain an LDAP naming adaptor for Net8. This allows you to define net service names in an LDAP directory instead of the traditional tnsnames.ora file. Another planned use for LDAP in the Oracle world is to support single sign-on. Instead of defining the same user over-and-over again in different databases, you will be able to define a user once in an LDAP directory. Information about a user's roles and privileges will be stored in the directory. The user will authenticate to the directory, and once that has been done, the user will be able to connect to any Oracle database that he has been authorized to use without having to supply a database-specific username and password.
