- the system already uses a relational database to store most of the data it is very expensive to support another database.
- it means that some of the data is duplicated in both LDAP and the relational db causing data synchronization problems
- the system needs to be reliable, i.e. transactional, to the best of my knowledge LDAP doesn't support transactions meaning that we could end up with inconsistent data
- we use the data in reports