Re: Supported RFC's and "features"

[Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com>]

Marc Chantreux wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 12:30:09PM -0800, Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
> > > - RFC 2891 (server side sorting)
> > Why is this problematic?  Server side sorting is a horrible waste of server
> > CPU that's better served by the client doing sorting how it wants.
>
> well ... i think this feature could be very usefull in certain cases.
>
> Imagine I just want to know what's the max uidNumber used in my directory.
> actually, i ask the server to give all the uidNumbers and my client sort
> them. isn't it an horrible waste of bandwidth ?

In OpenLDAP you would set an equality index on uidNumber and do a query for, 
e.g., (uidNumber<=2147483647) with sizelimit=1.

The server side sorting feature is an extremely indirect (and inefficient) 
route to answering this particular question; you get the answer you're looking 
for as a side-effect of a non-standard query. That seems pretty silly, when 
you can just get the answer as a direct result of a standard LDAP query.
--
  -- Howard Chu
  Chief Architect, Symas Corp.  http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun        http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP     http://www.openldap.org/project/