I used to work at a company with a huge LDAP database that had been growing in uncontrolled and organic ways for years. If you've never worked with LDAP before,

I used to work at a company with a huge LDAP database that had been growing in uncontrolled and organic ways for years. If you've never worked with LDAP before, it's basically a big key-value store, with some optional schema enforcement. We spent an inordinate amount of time manually cleaning it up and trying to enforce some kind of data integrity and we were always bemoaning the lack of a real structural schema. I think the kind of ad-hoc generic data typing described in this article is sometimes the right solution but it comes at a cost.