I have a script that periodically runs on our company PCs and uses WMI to check what MS hotfixes are installed. I would like to turn this info into a useful little tool to monitor our patching success/progress, with the idea being that I could get lists of all the PCs missing a given list of patches, or all the patches installed/missing from a given PC, as well as some nice summary figures for the boss.
Since there are a lot of MS patches for XP, Office etc and we have a few thousand PCs a simple sorted Excel spreadsheet isn’t going to do the job and so I thought I should get the data into a database (probably SQL Server Express), but I’m not sure how to design it. I don’t have a lot of experience at designing databases, just dabbling at reading info from them, so all I can think of is a large single table that has a row for each PC and a column for each patch with a true/false for each bit of data.
This approach just strikes me as being too simplistic to be an efficient way of doing things so I was wondering if anyone had ever done something similar before or had any thoughts? Am I on the right lines or showing my ignorance?!
Any comments appreciated.