During the early stages of developing a new extMA performance is not probably the first thing on your mind, you are mainly concerned with getting the basic functionality of an extMA working properly, and there is nothing wrong with this approach. But as you move your extMA out of your development environment and start testing it against some real production scenarios, the issues of performance become more important. Things that worked just fine in you lab environment with a dozen or a hundred test accounts suddenly don’t go as smoothly anymore when your extMA needs to handle for example 30,000 accounts. Of course, performance tuning is more of an art then a science and highly dependant on the system that you are connecting to. But there are some universal performance improving principals, one of which is minimizing number of round trips to database/directory in order to reduce the impact of network latencies incurred by each trip. While working on performance tuning of my extMA for Oracle Security Principals I was reminded of the importance of this principal and would like to share some of that experience in this blog. ...

Probably like many of you, I quite often need to create test environment for dealing with a range of test scenarios. Invariably, when building a test environment, a question comes up on how to populate Active Directory with test accounts to simulate production environment. Sometimes you may be able to perform restore from production environment or get an export from HR or other systems. But in many cases (for example performance testing, product functionality testing, backup and recovery etc) you don’t really need to have an exact replica of your production environment, so it would be very useful to have a script that could generate a simple but realistic Active Directory environment based on some random names....