5 minutes or less: Indexing Attributes in OID

I’ve written this short post as just a note to myself quite some time back. Since I had to rely on it quite a couple of times, I thought it would be worth sharing it with our readers.

It may be too basic to some people, but I am sure others out there had, are having or will have issues when running searches with LDAP filters against OID (Oracle Internet Directory), especially if those filters refer to custom attributes. The information presented here is certainly available in OID Administration Guide at Managing Directory Schema chapter, but it still might be a little bit scattered.

[Update on 12/02/2013]: Starting with OID 11.1.1.6, there's an autocatalog feature that automatically indexes attributes upon a search. This is controlled by DSA-wide orclautocatalog attribute, which is enabled by default.

First and foremost: an attribute is only searchable in OID if it is indexed. This is definitely not the case of any your brand new custom attributes.

Any search containing a non-indexed attribute in the ldap filter will return something like: