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?