Emmanuel, thank you. One follow-up and I should have included this in the original message. My query includes an OU as the base dn in the search. All entries in this OU all have the same 4 objectclass values. No other objectclass types are in this particular OU. Say I had 1000 entries. Each count for top, person, organizationalPerson and inetOrgperson would all yield 1000 hits. In this case, should I include the objectclass in the query at all? My other search attribute is indexed. Thanks again for the excellent information!
Regards, Carlo Accorsi -----Original Message----- From: Emmanuel Lécharny [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 11:03 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Is it faster/better to include one objectclass or all in query? Le 3/14/12 3:51 PM, [email protected] a écrit : > Hi, when searching for a user having this objectclass hierarchy > > top > |_person > |_organizationalPerson > |_inetOrgPerson > > and uid = 'jsmith' > > Which query would be less expensive or better/faster? Thanks! > > (& > (objectclass=inetOrgPerson) > (uid=jsmith) > ) > > OR > > (& > (&(objectclass=top) > (objectclass=person) > (objectclass= organizationalPerson) > (objectclass=inetOrgPerson)) > (uid=jsmith) > ) > > > It depends on the number of entries selected by each of the filters. The way the filtering works - for an AND operation at least - is that we first evaluate the number of elements returned by each single filter, then we pick the smallest one and we process the search using this filter. For instance, in your case, we will have : (objectclass=top) -> matches all the entries (obviously) (objectclass=person) -> matches 1000 entries (objectclass= organizationalPerson) -> matches 100 entries (less than for the previous filter because organizationalPerson has person as a superior) (objectclass=inetOrgPerson) -> matches 10 entries (same raisonning than upper) now, - if (uid=jsmith) matches 55 entries, then we will use the (objectclass=inetOrgPerson) filter - if (uid=jsmith) matches 7 entries, then we will use this filter at the end, we will browse 10 or 7 entries, depending on the number of matched entries considering the filter. If we take your first filter (& (objectclass=inetOrgPerson) (uid=jsmith) ) it's even simpler, as we don't have to evaluate the hierarchy of ObjectClasses. End of the day : no need to pile up the atomic filters in your request, just use those that are the most discriminant. Last, not least, the 'cost' difference will be minimal anyway, as the evaluation is a pretty fast operation compared to pulling entries from the backend to return them. You will see no difference. The best thing to do is to have the correct index set depending on the requests you will submit. -- Regards, Cordialement, Emmanuel Lécharny www.iktek.com
