eDirectory is a hierarchical, object oriented database used to represent certain assets in an organization in a logical tree, including organizations, organizational units, people, positions, servers, volumes, workstations, applications, printers, services, and groups to name just a few.
eDirectory uses dynamic rights inheritance, which allows both global and specific access controls.
The software supports referential integrity, multi-master replication, and has a modular authentication architecture.
Versions of eDirectory prior to version 8 (then called Novell Directory Services) used a record-based database management engine called Recman, which relied on the Transaction Tracking System built into the NetWare operating system.
FLAIM is an open source embeddable database engine developed by Novell and released under the GPL license in 2006.