Overview of Catalog Services

Catalog Services lets administrators and applications create catalogs of frequently accessed NDS^TM objects. A catalog is a flatfile database that contains a snapshot of information from the NDS database. A catalog can contain information from an entire NDS tree or a portion of the tree. For example, you can create a catalog of all users with their complete names and their telephone numbers. The catalog is stored as an NDS object and provides rapid access to selected Directory data. Catalog objects are created, used, and managed using NWAdmin. The user can update the catalogs as needed or schedule periodic, automatic updates.

The two main purposes of Catalog Services are to provide

• Faster access to information in the NDS database

  Without Catalog Services, the user has to 'walk' the hierachical NDS tree to find an object in the NDS database. Catalog Services speeds up access, especially for information located across WAN links, because it puts a representation of that object into the local catalog. You can specify the criteria used to include objects in the catalog.

• Enhanced search capabilities through a query language for the catalog

  You can query (search) the catalog for specific information, such as a user's given name or access control list (ACL.)

Catalog Services consists of these components:

• dscat.nlm: This NetWare^® Loadable Module^TM (NLM^TM) is installed and loaded during the NetWare server installation. It contains the dredger that searches the NDS database for the objects and properties to include in the catalog.
• dscqry16.dll or dscqry32.dll: These DLLs are the query engines (16-bit or 32-bit) that the NetWare Administrator snap-in (or other applications) uses to query the directory.
• NetWare Administrator snap-in (dscatmgr.dll): Provides an interface to Catalog Services through NetWare Administrator. It lets you create, modify, query, index, and delete Catalog objects.