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Security and identity ⇄ Data warehouse

Active Directory to BigQuery integration — real-time, two-way sync

Keep Active Directory and BigQuery 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 BigQuery

Land the users, groups, and access events from Active Directory in BigQuery 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; BigQuery 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 BigQuery. Getting them there usually means a brittle export that runs overnight and hands auditors a snapshot that is already out of date.

Stacksync syncs Organizational contacts, Users, Groups, Group memberships from Active Directory into tables in BigQuery in real time, and the connection works in both directions: values computed in BigQuery, 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 Land CRM and ERP records in BigQuery continuously so dashboards reflect business systems without nightly batch jobs
  • 02 Activate modeled BigQuery tables by syncing computed attributes back into sales and marketing tools
  • 03 Keep security-group memberships aligned with application entitlement tables so access reflects the right teams as they change.
  • 04 Read Devices and service principals into a database for identity, asset, and license inventory across the tenant.

Common sync patterns

Directory data in the warehouse, minus the pipeline

Users, groups, and roles from Active Directory arrive in BigQuery 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 BigQuery, 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 BigQuery to surface who holds access they no longer need.

What you can sync between Active Directory and BigQuery

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 BigQuery objects How this pairing syncs
Service principals & applications App registrations and enterprise apps; read-mostly for entitlement and license inventory. Datasets Organizational container — you pick which dataset’s tables to sync. Service principals & applications is specific to Active Directory and Datasets to BigQuery — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Organizational units On-prem AD DS containers (LDAP organizationalUnit) used to scope which users and groups a sync includes. Projects Connection scope: the service account grants access per project. Organizational units is specific to Active Directory and Projects to BigQuery — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Organizational contacts Directory contact objects (orgContact); synced for shared address-book and CRM person records. Tables The syncable unit: only tables can be synced per the Stacksync docs. Organizational contacts is specific to Active Directory and Tables to BigQuery — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Users User accounts in Entra ID and on-prem AD DS; synced two-way to create, update attributes, and enable or disable accounts. Partitioned tables Synced like regular tables; partition columns map to target fields. Users is specific to Active Directory and Partitioned tables to BigQuery — 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. Clustered tables Supported; clustering is transparent to the sync. Groups is specific to Active Directory and Clustered tables to BigQuery — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.

How changes propagate between Active Directory and BigQuery

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 BigQuery 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 BigQuery as a row-level write, with types converted between the two schemas.

BigQuery Active Directory Sub-second propagation

DetectionChanges in BigQuery are captured at the source via change data capture — no polling loop against its API. Real-time notification service deployed into your Google Cloud project: Eventarc ("a notification service that enables real-time updates to happen").

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.
  • BigQuery: Subject to Google Cloud quotas on queries, DML, and streaming; DML is supported but the platform favors append-heavy batch and streaming loads over row-at-a-time writes.
What ships with Active Directory ⇄ BigQuery

Connect Active Directory and BigQuery for flexible, real-time data sync.

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

Real-time

Two-way sync

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

No-code + pro-code

Workflow automation

Trigger automated workflows whenever Active Directory or BigQuery 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 BigQuery record.

Observability

Monitoring

Track your Active Directory ⇄ BigQuery 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 BigQuery.

How the Active Directory and BigQuery 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.

BigQuery

Integration surface
GoogleSQL via the BigQuery REST API, client libraries, JDBC/ODBC drivers, and the Storage Read/Write APIs
Authentication
Google Cloud service account: create a dedicated service account, grant roles (BigQuery Data Editor, BigQuery Job User, Cloud Functions Service Agent, Cloud Run Developer, Eventarc Event Receiver
Change detection
Real-time notification service deployed into your Google Cloud project: Eventarc ("a notification service that enables real-time updates to happen") with a Cloud Run "secure portal for real-time notification service in
Capabilities
read · write · CDC
Rate limits
Subject to Google Cloud quotas on queries, DML, and streaming; DML is supported but the platform favors append-heavy batch and streaming loads over row-at-a-time writes
BigQuery setup guide
How it works

How to connect Active Directory to BigQuery — 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 BigQuery 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
    BigQuery connected
    OAuth 2.0
    SSH tunnel
    SSL certificate
    VPC peering
  2. 02

    Choose tables

    Pick the Active Directory and BigQuery 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 ⇄ BigQuery
    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 BigQuery
    Company company_name text
    Email email text
    Amount amount numeric
    Created created_at timestamp
FAQ

Active Directory and BigQuery 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:

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