OpenDJ provides several indexing schemes to speed up searches.

When a client requests a directory search operation, the client sends the server a filter expression such as (&(uid=*jensen*)(l=Stavanger)). The server then uses applicable indexes to find entries with attribute values likely to match the search. If no indexes are applicable, then the server potentially has to go through all entries to look for candidate matches.

Looking through all entries is resource-intensive for large directories. For this reason, the unindexed-search privilege, allowing users to request searches for which no applicable index exists, is reserved for the directory root user by default.

Rather than granting the unindexed-search privilege to more users and client applications, you configure indexes to correspond to the searches that clients need to perform.

This chapter first describes index types, then demonstrates how to index attribute values. This chapter also lists the default indexing configuration for OpenDJ directory server.