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Security and identity ⇄ Data warehouse

Active Directory to Azure Synapse Analytics integration — real-time, two-way sync

Keep Active Directory and Azure Synapse Analytics in sync without custom scripts. Cut weeks of integration work, eliminate silent data drift, and give your team a single, reliable source of truth.

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Adopted by fast-scaling companies moving mission-critical data in real time

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Why teams connect Active Directory and Azure Synapse Analytics

Land the users, groups, and access events from Active Directory in Azure Synapse Analytics continuously for security analytics, and write computed results back — without building or maintaining a pipeline.

Active Directory is the record of who exists and what they can reach; Azure Synapse Analytics is where the business measures everything else. The two overlap on people and their access — the same users, groups, roles, and events that Active Directory governs are what security, compliance, and analytics teams want to query in Azure Synapse Analytics. Getting them there usually means a brittle export that runs overnight and hands auditors a snapshot that is already out of date.

Stacksync syncs Devices, Directory roles, Service principals & applications, Organizational units from Active Directory into tables in Azure Synapse Analytics in real time, and the connection works in both directions: values computed in Azure Synapse Analytics, such as risk scores or access-review decisions, can be written back to attributes in Active Directory where the identity team acts on them. Schema changes are handled, API limits are managed, and the sync is something you configure rather than a pipeline you keep alive.

Common use cases

  • 01 Sync curated Synapse views into an operational Postgres or Azure SQL database that applications can query cheaply.
  • 02 Consolidate SaaS data alongside lake data so analysts join both through one SQL surface.
  • 03 Read Devices and service principals into a database for identity, asset, and license inventory across the tenant.
  • 04 Two-way sync Users and Groups between Microsoft Entra ID and an HRIS or Postgres so joiners, movers, and leavers provision and deprovision automatically.

Common sync patterns

Directory data in the warehouse, minus the pipeline

Users, groups, and roles from Active Directory arrive in Azure Synapse Analytics as queryable tables, current within seconds instead of a nightly directory export.

Access and sign-in analytics

Sign-in and access events from Active Directory land in Azure Synapse Analytics, so security and compliance teams can query who reached what, and when, alongside the rest of the business's data.

Access governance on joined data

Join Active Directory's users and group memberships with HR, product, and usage data already in Azure Synapse Analytics to surface who holds access they no longer need.

What you can sync between Active Directory and Azure Synapse Analytics

Representative objects on each side — any object or custom field can map to any target. Schemas are auto-detected; types are converted between the two systems.

Active Directory objects Azure Synapse Analytics objects How this pairing syncs
Users User accounts in Entra ID and on-prem AD DS; synced two-way to create, update attributes, and enable or disable accounts. Tables (dedicated SQL pool) Distributed warehouse tables that serve as sync destinations for analytics workloads. Users is specific to Active Directory and Tables (dedicated SQL pool) to Azure Synapse Analytics — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Groups Security and Microsoft 365 groups; synced two-way including name, type, and owner, with membership tracked separately. External tables Tables over files in the data lake, queried through serverless SQL and often read-only in syncs. Groups is specific to Active Directory and External tables to Azure Synapse Analytics — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Group memberships Member and owner links between users and groups; membership add/remove changes are surfaced by delta query. Views Curated projections used when downstream tools should not read base tables directly. Group memberships is specific to Active Directory and Views to Azure Synapse Analytics — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Devices Registered and joined device objects; typically read into a database for inventory and compliance reporting. Schemas Namespaces that separate staging, integration, and presentation layers. Devices is specific to Active Directory and Schemas to Azure Synapse Analytics — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Directory roles Admin role assignments (directoryRole); read for access reviews and least-privilege governance. Materialized views Precomputed aggregates that speed reads of frequently synced result sets. Directory roles is specific to Active Directory and Materialized views to Azure Synapse Analytics — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Service principals & applications App registrations and enterprise apps; read-mostly for entitlement and license inventory. SQL pools Dedicated or serverless compute contexts that determine how and where queries run. Service principals & applications is specific to Active Directory and SQL pools to Azure Synapse Analytics — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.

How changes propagate between Active Directory and Azure Synapse Analytics

Each direction of the sync is driven by what the source system can signal and what the destination accepts — detection, delivery, and expected latency below.

Active Directory Azure Synapse Analytics Sub-second propagation

DetectionActive Directory notifies Stacksync of record changes through webhook events. Microsoft Graph delta query (change tracking) for Users and Groups, plus change-notification subscriptions (webhooks) for near-real-time triggers.

DeliveryEach detected change is applied to Azure Synapse Analytics as a row-level write, with types converted between the two schemas.

Azure Synapse Analytics Active Directory Interval-based propagation

DetectionStacksync polls Azure Synapse Analytics for changes on an incremental schedule, reading only records changed since the previous pass. Polling on watermark columns.

DeliveryEach detected change is written to Active Directory through its API, with automatic retries and rate-limit backoff.

Rate-limit considerations

  • Active Directory: Graph throttles by resource-unit cost per app per tenant in 10-second windows (about 3,500–8,000 units by tenant size); directory delta tokens expire after ~7 days.
What ships with Active Directory ⇄ Azure Synapse Analytics

Connect Active Directory and Azure Synapse Analytics for flexible, real-time data sync.

Real-time sync, workflow automation, event queues, EDI, and monitoring, for every Active Directory–Azure Synapse Analytics connection.

Real-time

Two-way sync

Changes in Active Directory or Azure Synapse Analytics instantly reflect in both systems. No stale data, no manual imports.

No-code + pro-code

Workflow automation

Trigger automated workflows whenever Active Directory or Azure Synapse Analytics data changes, update records, fire webhooks, or kick off sequences without brittle API scripts.

At scale

Event queues

Handle millions of events per minute without losing a single Active Directory or Azure Synapse Analytics record.

Observability

Monitoring

Track your Active Directory ⇄ Azure Synapse Analytics sync health, view errors, and replay failed events in one click.

Trading partners

EDI

Transform legacy EDI complexity into simple database interactions between Active Directory and Azure Synapse Analytics.

How the Active Directory and Azure Synapse Analytics connectors work

Active Directory

Integration surface
Microsoft Graph REST API (Entra ID / cloud) and LDAP/LDAPS (on-premises AD DS)
Authentication
OAuth 2.0 via the Microsoft identity platform — an app registration with application or delegated permissions (e.g. User.ReadWrite.All, Group.ReadWrite.All) and admin consent; on-prem AD DS uses a bound service account over LDAPS.
Change detection
Microsoft Graph delta query (change tracking) for Users and Groups, plus change-notification subscriptions (webhooks) for near-real-time triggers; on-prem AD DS uses the DirSync control and uSNChanged polling.
Capabilities
read · write · webhooks
Rate limits
Graph throttles by resource-unit cost per app per tenant in 10-second windows (about 3,500–8,000 units by tenant size); directory delta tokens expire after ~7 days.

Azure Synapse Analytics

Integration surface
SQL wire protocol (TDS) with T-SQL for SQL pools; additional Spark and pipeline surfaces exist but syncs use the SQL endpoint
Authentication
SQL authentication or Microsoft Entra ID
Change detection
Polling on watermark columns; Synapse SQL pools do not expose log-based CDC for downstream consumers
Capabilities
read · write
How it works

How to connect Active Directory to Azure Synapse Analytics — three steps, no code

Configure and sync within minutes, no code. Whether you sync 50k or 100M+ records, Stacksync handles the queues, infra, and plumbing. Integrations are non-invasive and need zero setup on your systems.

  1. 01

    Connect your apps

    Authenticate Active Directory and Azure Synapse Analytics with each platform's native method — OAuth, API keys, or service accounts — plus secure options like SSH tunneling, IP whitelisting, and VPC peering.

    • OAuth 2.0
    • SSH tunnel
    • VPC peering
    Active Directory connected
    Azure Synapse Analytics connected
    OAuth 2.0
    SSH tunnel
    SSL certificate
    VPC peering
  2. 02

    Choose tables

    Pick the Active Directory and Azure Synapse Analytics objects to sync — Stacksync auto-detects both schemas, including custom fields where the platform exposes them. Sync to existing tables, or let Stacksync create new ones with ideal data types.

    • Standard objects
    • Custom objects
    • Auto-schema
    objects · Active Directory ⇄ Azure Synapse Analytics
    Customers 12,480
    Sales Orders 8,213
    Invoices 5,902
    Items 1,344
  3. 03

    Map fields

    Fields map automatically even when names and types differ. Stacksync handles transformation and type casting for you, zero configuration required.

    • Auto-map
    • Type casting
    • Transforms
    Active Directory Azure Synapse Analytics
    Company company_name text
    Email email text
    Amount amount numeric
    Created created_at timestamp
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FAQ

Active Directory and Azure Synapse Analytics integration FAQ

SECURITY

Security teams trust Stacksync

As a data company, we understand the importance of keeping your data secure. Stacksync is built with security best practices to keep your data safe at every layer, and is DPF-certified for US, EU, UK and CH data transfers.

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SSO & SCIM

Let your users access Stacksync from your centralized user management systems. Works with Okta, Azure, Google SSO and more.

Alerts

Immediately get alerted about record syncing issues over email, Slack, PagerDuty and WhatsApp. Resolve issues from a centralized dashboard with retry and revert options.

Secure connection options

Securely connects to your systems with:

OAuth 2 SSH Tunnelling SSL certificates IP Whitelisting VPN gateway VPC peering and more

Related integrations

Every pair below is a real-time, two-way sync. Search all 539 integrations available for Active Directory and Azure Synapse Analytics.

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