LDAP revisited

I had a chat to Jeremy Quinn of Cocoon and Apache fame on Wednesday regarding whether LDAP is in fact an over elaborate death trap designed by a Bond villain... and he was enclined to disagree. Jeremy has worked with both relational DB's and LDAP before, and emphasised that the biggest advantage LDAP has is that it is naturally hierarchichal in terms of organisation. With relation DB's you kind of 'fake' hierarchy, this seems to me to be a valid point. Furthermore, modifying LDAP at any time during a projects history is easy, classes do not need to be re-compiled etc etc, whereas we know how many mechanisms have invented to ease this process when using DB's. Thanks Jeremy, finally I have a glimmer of understanding as to why we should want to use this (not so) new fangled technology in place of a simple Mysql installation! More reading and playing with LDAP to come!!!!!!