I think I have a good grasp of SOA records, but more at an Internet scale: the SOA record indicates who is authoritative for DNS records for a zone.

From an AD perspective, when a zone is created that is AD integrated, does the concept of SOA still apply?  In my particular case, we have "made up" a zone, so it is just considered private and is only available on our internal network.

When I review the properties of this private zone, no matter what AD server I log onto, the SOA entry is the local server.

Does this mean the general use of SOA isn't really meaningful in an AD-integrated zone?

Hi,

As you mentioned that SOA resource record indicates that this DNS name server is the best source of information for the data within this DNS domain.

The Start of Authority (SOA) RR is the first record in any zone file. It identifies a primary DNS name server for the zone as the best source of information for the data within that zone, and it is also an entity processing the updates for the zone.

Double click the SOA RR you may find Minimum TTL, this option value applies to all resource records in the zone file. And it is supplied in query responses to inform other servers how long they should keep the data in cache.

Besides, we may manually change zone type from AD-Integrated to Primary/secondary by SOA RR. In contrast, zone transfer between primary and secondary zone may rely on SOA RR more often.
              
Best Regards,
Eve Wang