Update Active Directory mail user attribute from SQL server 2008

Question

Hello Stackoverflow members

I am working in an educational institution and we need to push certain information that this maintained in the MSSQL2008 database for our student management application.

I would like to know if there is a way to use a database trigger to automatically update a user attribute field in Active directory. This would specifically allow us to automatically update email aliases within the directory system as the users update their records.

Is there a way of doing this without writing a complete middleware application rather than a db trigger firing a stored procedure to update Active Directory.

I have seen a few posts regarding getting AD data into SQL server but so far I haven't found any posts going the other way.

Regards

Gus

Answer 1

I am not sure about SQL commands for that but xp_cmdshell commands lets you executes a given windows command string/batch file as an operating-system command shell and returns any output as rows of text.

So using xp_cmdshell you can run a batch file/ windows command through SQL trigger that can update a user attribute field in Active directory.

Syntax for xp_cmdshell is :

xp_cmdshell {'command_string'} [, no_output]

Arguments

'command_string'

Is the command string to execute at the operating-system command shell. command_string is varchar(8000) or nvarchar(4000), with no default. command_string cannot contain more than one set of double quotation marks. A single pair of quotation marks is necessary if any spaces are present in the file paths or program names referenced by command_string. If you have trouble with embedded spaces, consider using FAT 8.3 file names as a workaround.

no_output

Is an optional parameter executing the given command_string, and does not return any output to the client.

Return Code Values

0 (success) or 1 (failure)

Result Sets

for example, executing this xp_cmdshell statement returns a directory listing of the current directory.

xp_cmdshell 'dir *.exe'

For details on xp_cmdshell refer : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa260689(v=sql.80).aspx

Hope it helps you to find a way...