Well, back-bdb was introduced in OpenLDAP 2.1. It obviously wasn't the preferred backend prior to that.

This should be ancient history, but we've seen time and again that old versions of OpenLDAP (and the old docs that go with them) are very much in the ether. Noting the statement "the default database is {ldbm,gdbm,ldbm with sleepycat}" is out of date still seems to be news to some users in 2007. (I wish it wasn't.)

On Tue, 17 Jul 2007, matthew sporleder wrote:

When was gdbm the default backend?

On 7/17/07, Aaron Richton richton@nbcs.rutgers.edu wrote:

...

Pretty unviable and quite a bit slower. As an aside, the "default" nowadays is bdb/hdb (Sleepycat) based.

http://www.openldap.org/faq/data/cache/378.html

On Tue, 17 Jul 2007, Daniel Corbe wrote:

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I was wondering what the viability of switching to a MySQL-based back-end would be and how much slower it is compared to the default gdbm back-end. -Daniel