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Re: slapadd -q (quick mode)



--On Friday, August 26, 2005 5:51 PM +0200 Hallvard B Furuseth <h.b.furuseth@usit.uio.no> wrote:

The description of '-q' in slapadd(5) says:

   enable quick (fewer integrity checks) mode.  Does fewer consistency
   checks on the input data, and no consistency checks when writing the
   database.  Improves the load time but if any errors or interruptions
   occur the resulting database will be unusable.

First, "no consistency checks when writing the database" sounds a bit
discouraging.  Does it mean that slapadd may create a bogus database and
not discover it?  Can -q cause a slapadd to fail which would otherwise
succeed?  Please either document when one can trust a slapadd which
returns success.  Or otherwise tweak the description a little...



I've been using slapadd -q extensively through 2.2 and through 2.3.

slapadd -q has been entirely safe for me as long. The point of that paragraph is that if you kill slapadd, or an error occurs during the slapadd, you will need to wipe the database and start over. Apart from that, it is completely safe. ;)


Second, I'd like this option to be split: Assuming -q is safe to use
when creating a database from scratch which will be deleted if slapadd
fails, I'd like to turn off database checking but turn on LDIF checking.
I suppose that would mean adding either an option which checks the LDIF
despite -q, or an option which only turns off database checking and not
LDIF checking.


I disagree. Slapadd -q as it is now can still be used safely with -c, which is entirely sufficient. slapadd -q was added because of research done on how and why large database loads took forever, and adding new checks to make it take even longer are entirely counter intuitive.


I'll also note that -q applies to slapindex, where I've had a single indexing time drop from 35 minutes to two minutes because of it.

--Quanah

--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Developer
ITSS/Shared Services
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html

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