A catalog is an NDS object that stores information from the NDS database. The catalog stores only objects and properties that you specify and lets you find information about those objects without a time-consuming search of the entire Directory.
Catalogs are especially useful in networks where some NDS objects might only be accessible across WAN links, because searching the NDS Directory across those links consumes time and network bandwidth. You could, for example, build a catalog of your company's employees and their telephone numbers.
Some applications create their own catalogs. For example, Novell's Contextless Login creates a catalog of users' common names and their telephone numbers.
The catalog is stored as an NDS object, the Catalog object. To create a catalog, a User must have the following minimum rights:
You can refresh (update) the catalog manually or at scheduled intervals. Refreshing the catalog means that the dredger searches the NDS database for any information pertaining to a specific catalog, such as added users, changed telephone numbers, etc. and updates the catalog with this new information.
For each catalog, you create a master catalog. You can also create one or more slave catalogs. The relationship between master and slave catalogs is similar to the one between NDS partitions and replicas. The slave catalog is a copy of the master catalog. The master catalog receives its information from the dredger and then replicates this information to the slave catalogs. The advantage of the master/slave model is that the catalog dredger, which takes up valuable network bandwidth, has to dredge (search) in only one place.
Querying and indexing a catalog lets you retrieve information from it.