Turn On, Tune In, and Disconnect, Part 1

Executive Summary: Disconnected recordsets are ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) recordsets that reside only in memory while they're active. Because they're in memory, accessing data within them can be quick and efficient. The script UpdateSIDdb.vbs demonstrates how to create and use disconnected recordsets. You can use this VBScript script to create and update a low-maintenance database that holds SID history information for group and user objects in a domain.

For those of you familiar with the '60s, you probably surmised that the title of this article is a spinoff of a phrase coined by the late Dr. Timothy Leary: "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out." Paraphrasing Dr. Leary, "Turn On" means to delve within and trigger your neural and genetic systems, "Tune In" means to interact harmoniously with the world around you, and "Drop Out" means to be self-reliant.

Rest assured that I'm not going to discuss what was going on back in the '60s, but in a sense, the phrase holds meaning for scripters, even if only in a very imaginative way. For scripters, "Turn On" means to activate your computer system, "Tune In" means to focus on the data you want to acquire, and "Disconnect" means to detach or become independent of any live data source.

The detached data sources that I’m referring to are called disconnected recordsets. They're ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) recordsets that reside only in memory while they're active. Because they're in memory, accessing data within them can be quick and efficient. My experience is that these types of databases are most efficient for small databases composed of less than 10 fields and under 10,000 records. Although you're limited to how large these databases can be by the amount of memory you have available on your system, disconnected recordsets provide high-performance access to data with low memory-overhead and small disk-space footprints.

To create a disconnected recordset, you create an ActiveX Data Objects Recordset (ADOR) object using a command such as

Set DRS = CreateObject("ADOR.Recordset")

ADOR is a subset of the ADO Database (ADODB) Library. The main difference between the two is that the ADODB Library contains additional server side objects (i.e., the Connection, Command, Error, and Parameters objects) that you can use to connect to, communicate with, and manipulate an active database. ADOR is a lightweight ADO client that exposes only the Recordset interface so that you can create and manipulate recordsets that aren't connected to an active database. If you have the ability to create ADO instances on your system, then you have the ability to create ADOR instances as well because ADOR is a subset of ADODB, which in turn is a subset of ADO.

I used ADOR in the script UpdateSIDdb.vbs, which creates and updates a low-maintenance database that holds SID history information for group and user objects in a domain. The first time you run this script, it creates and populates the SID database. Each time you run it thereafter, it adds information about domain group objects and user objects that don’t already exist in the database.

I run UpdateSIDdb.vbs daily as scheduled task. I use the database primarily as a tool to retrieve a user's or group's ID whenever I have only a SID. You can find yourself with only a SID in several situations, including: . . .