Editing OpenLDAP (section)

===Overall concept===
Historically the OpenLDAP server (slapd, the Standalone LDAP Daemon) architecture was split between a frontend that handles network access and protocol processing, and a backend that deals strictly with data storage. This split design was a feature of the original University of Michigan code written in 1996<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.tux.org/pub/net/ldap/ldap-3.3.tar.Z |title=Archived copy  |access-date=19 August 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050217100527/http://www.tux.org/pub/net/ldap/ldap-3.3.tar.Z |archive-date=17 February 2005 |url-status=dead}}</ref> and carried on in all subsequent OpenLDAP releases. The original code included one main database backend and two experimental/demo backends. The architecture is modular and many different backends are now available for interfacing to other technologies, not just traditional databases.

Note: In older (1.x) releases, the terms "backend" and "database" were often used interchangeably. To be precise, a "backend" is a class of storage interface, and a "database" is an instance of a backend. The slapd server can use arbitrarily many backends at once, and can have arbitrarily many instances of each backend (i.e., arbitrarily many databases) active at once.<ref name="backends">{{cite web|url=https://www.openldap.org/software/man.cgi?query=slapd.backends&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenLDAP+2.6-Release&arch=default&format=html |title=OpenLDAP man page on slapd backends |access-date=25 October 2021}}</ref>