Active Directory, 3rd Edition

ADAM Schema

As mentioned previously, the initial ADAM schema is a small subset of the Active Directory schema. The ability to extend the schema is the same as in Active Directory, so you can fully expand the schema to be the same as the AD Schema. Because of this, ADAM is a great place to test schema modifications that want to make in Active Directory. The fact that the extensions work the same and you can quickly destroy and recreate ADAM instances means that you can quickly test new extensions, changing the definitions until you get exactly what you want. You can even have multiple instances on the same computer running at the same time, each with a different version of the schema so you can easily compare and contrast them. For details on working with the schema, AD and ADAM, see Chapters 4 and 12.

Virtual List View (VLV) Index Support

ADAM supports an additional type of index that is not currently supported by Active Directory. The index is a subtree container index and was specifically added to better support VLV operations. Microsoft first introduced this change for ADAM V1.0 as the hotfix for Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 832474 and was only available upon request. The hotfix is now included with ADAM SP1 and ADAM R2 for everyone's benefit.

Creating this index allows any VLV operations using a particular attribute as the sort key to be handled in a significantly more efficient manner. It can also prevent a common failure that causes a VLV query to terminate with a "Critical ...