Asterisk and Address Book Lookup

[uxbod]

Am trying to find a method of being able to query the Zimbra address book for a telephone number. I know that the address book is stored in the mysql database and not LDAP so performing an ldapsearch appears to be out of the window. I can do it in Perl/PHP using pre-auth and JSON but that is quite slow. How would you handle it ? Export all the contacts to a CSV and import into an external LDAP server ?