use Net::LDAP::LDIF - no, really, use it!

It took me a while to figure this one out. I guess if I had a better grasp of hashes, this would've been more obvious. The LDIF I was reading was HUGE. I found a good example on PerlMonks that showed this VERY useful line:

$uid = $entry->get_value("uid");

I used DataDumper to find the key names of the other values and then I was off and running: parsing an LDIF filled with 40,000 users and running reports on anything I wanted. On my workstation, it only took 24 seconds to generate multiple reports! VERY COOL!