Win32 System Services: The Heart of Windows® 98 and Windows® 2000

5.3. Active Directory Architecture

This section introduces some of the primary architectural components of the Active Directory.

DATA MODEL

The Active Directory data model is derived from the X.500 data model. The directory holds objects that represent things of various sorts, which are described by attributes. The universe of objects that can be stored in the directory is defined in the schema. For each object class, the schema defines what attributes an instance of the class must have, what additional attributes it may have, and what object class can be a parent of the current object class.

SCHEMA

The Active Directory schema is implemented as a set of object-class instances stored in the directory. This is very different from many other directories, ...