Querying an AD Group, cached or direct?

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All Forums >> [Management Products] >> System Center Products >> System Center Configuration Manager >> Querying an AD Group, cached or direct?

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Querying an AD Group, cached or direct? - 8/11/2008 4:45:55 AM

irafn233

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Does SCCM perform an immediate direct query of AD, for members of an AD Group, when I issue an say:

select * from SMS_R_System where SMS_R_System.SystemGroupName = 'MS Office Project Professional 2007'

or does it just query the cashed content from the last AD System Group Discovery cycle?

I tried browsing through the (vast number of) tables, unable however to find any cached content.

My guess is that Group Names are cached (in: SMS_CEN_System_System_Group_Name_ARR), and then queried direct for members at request.

Caching all group members also seems a bit illogical to me, however not everything strike me as logical i SCCM.

Does anybody know?

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RE: Querying an AD Group, cached or direct? - 8/11/2008 5:40:06 AM

skissinger

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From: Sherry Kissinger
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ConfigMgr queries pull data from SQL tables, and those tables are populated via various means. In this case, the AD System Group Discovery Cycle.

(To me, it seems illogical to go outside of the database when submitting an SQL query)

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RE: Querying an AD Group, cached or direct? - 8/11/2008 7:27:07 AM

irafn233

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Thanks alot for your answer Sherry.

I always pictured the AD System Group Discovery as a - discovery methode. I understand SCCM takes the opertunity to cache membership data during the discover and that this, by the way, is the only means.

We have a system with 7000 workstations and 800 applications. We use AD groups as a trigger for sw distribution and consequently all workstations appear in multiple AD groups.
This amounts to a lot membership data!

We run the AD System Group Discovery on a 4 hour schedule, and at every cycle approx. 7000 DDR's are generated. I have no idea how long time SCCM uses to process all this data, but I reckon an hour or two.

In a development/testing situation this is long time to wait (4 hour + 2 hour processing time). Even if I trigger the AD System Group Discovery, I can expect a 2 hour delay, and a hevy load on the server.

Looking for a way to shorten the development/testing cycle, I wonder if You would know of any methode to update the membership data of just one AD Group ?

Thanks in advance

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RE: Querying an AD Group, cached or direct? - 8/11/2008 8:31:57 AM

irafn233

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Would anyone know which table caches the AD Group membership (so I can tell when the membership is updated) ?

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RE: Querying an AD Group, cached or direct? - 8/11/2008 10:38:23 AM

jnelson993

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Yeah, AD processing, especially on large sites is a time-consuming operation. From the time that discovery is kicked off, to the time all the DDRs finish processing can be hours, and then if you've got collections based on that data, you have to wait longer for the collections to update. For that reason, we don't rely on AD group membership from discovery to handle time-sensitive software pushes. If we wanted to use it that way, I'd just use VBScript or PowerShell to pull the AD information and update my own tables directly instead of relying on the AD discovery. That way I can pull only those records that have changed since the last AD pull and I can run it more often. The processing would be faster, the amount of data SMS/CM has to deal with would be minimal and the time taken to get it all into SQL would be minimal.

If you're looking to query the AD Group membership (for systems, not users) it's dbo.v_RA_System_SystemGroupName. I wouldn't query or update the underlying table directly (which is dbo.System_System_Group_Name_ARR). If you want to roll your own script that populates this, you'd jus create your own DDRs and put them in the inboxes.

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RE: Querying an AD Group, cached or direct? - 8/12/2008 3:13:23 AM

irafn233

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Thanks alot John; the DDR Idea is great.

However, from the logs I can see that our system is more or less constantly busy processing DDR's.

Would you know of any means to push a DDR in front of the processing queue, or do SCCM simply process them in date/time order ?

And; if I tamper with the file date, and create an old DDR, will SCCM consider it outdated?

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RE: Querying an AD Group, cached or direct? - 8/12/2008 7:14:34 AM

skissinger

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To sidestep your questions completely, I wonder if your organization might benefit from a 3rd party application from www.systemcentertools.com, Enhanced System Discovery. ESD 2007 is designed to alleviate the issues you are seeing w/Discovery.

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RE: Querying an AD Group, cached or direct? - 8/12/2008 9:39:12 AM

irafn233

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Thanks Sherry I'll take it into consideration

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