ISO/IEC 9594-4:2020 specifies the behaviour of DSAs taking part in a distributed directory consisting of multiple Directory systems agents (DSAs) and/or LDAP servers with at least one DSA. The allowed behaviour has been designed to ensure a consistent service given a wide distribution of the DIB across a distributed directory. Only the behaviour of DSAs taking part in a distributed directory is specified. The behaviour of LDAP servers are specified in relevant LDAP specifications. There are no special requirements on an LDAP server beyond those given by the LDAP specifications.

The Directory is not intended to be a general purpose database system, although it may be built on such systems. It is assumed that there is a considerably higher frequency of queries than of updates.