> For example, I didn't understand why Active Directory uses search dialog boxes for every "picker" GUI control instead of a simpler drop-down or something similar... until I worked in an environment with 2 million objects in the directory.
And that’s when you realize that searching in AD is actually dog slow, and you are better off just syncing the whole thing to a proper database, then checking if the object still exists after.
Seriously, why does a search that takes 1ms in postgres take 3 full seconds in AD?
It's a very simple database engine, effectively the same as Microsoft Access but 64-bit and server hosted. The internal data representation is also sub-optimal because it uses a triplestore (key-column-value) to support LDAP schema changes without having to apply matching SQL schema changes. I don't believe it has any sort of full-text indexing capability either, it just uses ordinary sorted indexes. Hence, some search types are effectively table scans.
And that’s when you realize that searching in AD is actually dog slow, and you are better off just syncing the whole thing to a proper database, then checking if the object still exists after.
Seriously, why does a search that takes 1ms in postgres take 3 full seconds in AD?