Updating many records in production

Products

• CA Directory

Issue/Introduction

Customer wants to use the DXMODIFY command to delete an attribute against ~300,000 users in a DSA. 

Environment

CA Directory 14.1.06.

Two directory servers configured in Multiwrite replication between each other.

Resolution

Updating many records in one go in production can be dangerous, mainly because of replication and possible network congestion.

The following two ways are recommended (should be tested in your testing environment first):

• Split the ~300,000 records update into about 30 smaller updates of ~10,000 records and run those updates in a sequence with delays between updates of about 10-20 seconds to make replication pass and apply the updates. Some configuration changes described in "Additional Recommendations" section might be required: Removing an Organization containing Millions of records - CA Directory. Also changing multi-write-outstanding-ops to 1000 is recommended: Command set multi-write-outstanding-ops.
• Another approach is to stop the second node, update only the first node, backup the data of the first node and restore this data on the second node. The procedure is well described in this KB article (while the purpose of the KB article is different): CA Directory - DSA out of sync.