Getting user data from Active Directory using PL/SQL

Question

I had a discussion today regarding an Oracle procedure I wrote some time ago.

I wanted to get 7500 user email addresses from Active Directory using PL/SQL. AD will return a maximum of 1000 rows and the LDAP provider used by Oracle will not support paging.

Therefore, my solution was to filter on the last two characters of the sAMAccountName (*00,*01,*02...etc.). This results in 126 queries (100 for account names ending in digits, 26 for those ending in a letter...this was sufficient for my AD setup).

The person I was speaking to (it was a job interview by the way) said he could have done it a better way, but he would not tell me what that method was.

Could anybody hazard a guess at what this method was?

Answer 1

If the result set is sorted by name, you could just ask for the next 1.000 with a name greater than the last one. And repeat it until you get either less than 1.000 or no more results.

Answer 2

Really trivial, as a job interview question, I don't know the skills they required, but in my opinion it's a strange "Oracle" question because it requires the need of a detailed knowledge of Microsoft AD, but no particular PL/SQL knowledge.

You probably had to say to use Attribute Range Retrieval. Here it is explained http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa772308