[389-users] Re: How to activate server-side sorting?

On Wed, Oct 29, 2025, at 3:27 PM, Mark Reynolds via 389-users wrote:

>      When you say 'there is no way to "tune"' sorting, does that mean 

> that indexing won't help?

Correct, sorting does not use indexes.  Not sure how you could index 

sorted results since there are countless ways you can sort result sets.  

So sorting takes the resulting entries (which might be gathered by 

indexes) but then it reorders/sorts them based on the sort control provided.

The other option would be to use VLV indexes which are sort of 

predefined sorted results.  VLV searches are a bit more complicated 

though: 

Way way back there was code to use a VLV index to serve sorted results (from a regular LDAP search with the sort control rather than an explicit VLV search). I don't know if that code still exists though.

Obviously with sorting you need an index that actually has the required results sorted in the way the query specifies, so any old index won't work.