• James Stephens (1/31/2011)


    Hi,

    Great article. On the same general topic but stepping back to the part about getting the AD data into tables:

    It's 2011. Why the heck doesn't Microsoft store AD information in a true relational db to begin with?

    --Jim

    Because AD is a hierarchical data store. Based on LDAP, it's very much like XML. Parent-child relationships, extensible object types, and the variety of attribute types mean that a relational data store is a poor fit -- especially since the primary use case is individual item transactional processing.