Re: Directory Structure

[Jon Roberts <jon@mentata.com>]

Asaf Shakarchi wrote:
> In our hosting company, we have a directory that contains any 
> information about our customers,
...
> So one customer can have several services, thus, we create several CNs 
> for each Customer per service.
...
> We thought about changing the directory to something that easier to 
> maintain and easier to read
...
> How slow will it make the queries? Is it a common way of building a 
> directory? Or should I stick with the current one?

It is common to put all accounts/identities under the same branch or 
node of the DIT to prevent the duplicate entry problems. The search 
speed will depend on many things such as hardware, platform, indexing, 
and amount of data. In general, though, searching on an indexed 
attribute through a pool of many thousands of entries using reasonable 
hardware and sane configuration should still be very fast.

I would recommend you consider defining your separate objectclasses as 
auxiliary extensions of inetorgperson and putting all customer entries 
under a single ou node participating in whichever classes they need. 
That way you have a single record for a customer regardless of whether 
they use DNS, email, web or all three. Good design up front could save 
you some headaches.

Jon Roberts
www.mentata.com