James Serra's Blog

James is a big data and data warehousing technology specialist at Microsoft. He is a thought leader in the use and application of Big Data technologies, including MPP solutions involving hybrid technologies of relational data, Hadoop, and private and public cloud. Previously he was an independent consultant working as a Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence architect and developer. He is a prior SQL Server MVP with over 30 years of IT experience. James is a popular blogger (JamesSerra.com) and speaker, having presented at dozens of PASS events including the PASS Business Analytics conference and the PASS Summit. He is the author of the book “Reporting with Microsoft SQL Server 2012”. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

Archives: August 2017

Azure Archive Blob Storage

Last week Microsoft released a public preview of a new service called Azure Archive Blob Storage, offering customers a lower-cost cloud storage solution for rarely accessed data. This allows for storage tiering, where organizations can place their critical data on expensive, high-performance storage and then move it down the line… Read more

2 comments, 1,002 reads

Posted in James Serra's Blog on 31 August 2017

Data Virtualization vs Data Warehouse

Data virtualization goes by a lot of different names: logical data warehouse, data federation, virtual database, and decentralized data warehouse. Data virtualization allows you to integrate data from various sources, keeping the data in-place, so that you can generate reports and dashboards to create business value from the data. It… Read more

0 comments, 747 reads

Posted in James Serra's Blog on 24 August 2017

Microsoft Big Data Certification Exams

I previously blogged about Microsoft certification changes, and since then there have been some new Microsoft Big Data certifications exams released:

Already live:

70-773: Analyzing Big Data with Microsoft R

70-774: Perform Cloud Data Science with Azure Machine Learning

70-775: Perform Data Engineering on Microsoft Azure HDInsight

Now in… Read more

3 comments, 670 reads

Posted in James Serra's Blog on 8 August 2017

Azure Analysis Services web designer

Microsoft has released a preview of the Azure Analysis Services web designer. This is a browser-based experience that will allow developers to start creating and managing Azure Analysis Services (AAS) semantic models quickly and easily. SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) will still be the… Read more

1 comments, 641 reads

Posted in James Serra's Blog on 2 August 2017

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