I reckon that either platform could give sufficient performance. Another question to ask is which platform your technical contributors are going to be most comfortable with. From what I have seen, developers are far more likely to be comfortable with a traditional relational database like postgres. Even at the systems level, you might have better luck sourcing a DBA to figure out scaling / performance issues than an LDAP guru.

That said, in my experience, the OpenLDAP has fewer "moving parts" and if your data can live in memory then there is very little tuning to do. LDAP is also handier to query from command-line, FWIW, and you could use it as an authentication mechanism for the contacts in your database if you wanted to do such a thing.

-danny

On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 4:41 PM, John Lewis <oflameo2@gmail.com> wrote:

I want to start a project to document my local government starting at
the municipal level and going upwards from there. I want to build an
interface to allow people to look up their representatives and their
public servants by issue and geographic area or issue and get their
contact information back.

I want it to to have fast lookups so community organizers will come to
my site first they want to find out who does what. I would also like it
to be able to scale geographically so I can get local activist could
have their own copy of the database on a local server that they can also
delegate access to. I would like to delegate updates to a development
version of the database to other people similar to Open Street Map, but
I would still like to verify changes so there won't be a flood of bad
data. The presentation and the data storage will be separate components.

Knowing this information could you tell me what data management engine
would be more appropriate for the task?

http://dannyman.toldme.com