Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

Hi All, 

We are looking for a bit of advice or experiences when it comes to querying 
the grouper database to produce attributes for Shibboleth or other purposes.

Our Shibboleth is currently configured to query the grouper database to 
retrieve all group’s that a logged in user is a member of. We have found 
recently that the performance of this has become a bit temperamental, and at 
times Shibboleth has not been able to retrieve groups from grouper with the 
query apparently timing out. We use a MySQL for our grouper database and we 
use the following query to retrieve the groups from the database;

SELECT DISTINCT ga.value AS grouper_groups 
FROM grouper_attributes AS ga, grouper_members gm, grouper_memberships AS gms 
WHERE ga.value LIKE '%:%' 
AND ga.value NOT LIKE '% %' 
AND ga.group_id = gms.owner_id 
AND gms.member_id = gm.id 
AND gm.subject_id = concat('${campusid.get(0)}','@ncl.ac.uk'

With the installation of Grouper 1.4.2 we attempted to use the 
grouper_membership view to retrieve peoples groups, however we found running 
a simple query on this view took double the time to execute as the one we 
have been using. 

So we are wondering if anyone has any advice on the best way to get data out 
of the grouper database to be used in situations such as the above? If this 
is not the best route to go down we are also considering looking into using 
the LDAP connector as an alternative.

Regards

Richard James
Newcastle University