James Serra

James works at Microsoft as a big data and data warehousing solution architect where he has been for most of the last nine years. He is a thought leader in the use and application of Big Data and advanced analytics, including data architectures such as the modern data warehouse, data lakehouse, data fabric, and data mesh. 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 35 years of IT experience. He is a popular blogger (JamesSerra.com) and speaker, having presented at dozens of major events including SQLBits, PASS Summit, Data Summit and the Enterprise Data World conference. He is the author of the book “Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh”.

Blog Post

Microsoft Ignite Announcements Nov 2025

Announced at Microsoft Ignite two weeks ago were many new product features related to the data platform. Check out the Major announcements and Book of News. I went through the many announcements and picked...

2025-12-10 (first published: )

354 reads

Blog Post

Azure IoT Operations

I want to talk about a fairly new product that you may not be aware of: Azure IoT Operations, which GA’d last November (it was first announced at Ignite...

2025-09-03 (first published: )

778 reads

Blogs

Using Prompt AI for a Travel Data Analysis

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I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt...

FinOps for Kubernetes: Leveraging OpenCost, KubeGreen, and Kubecost for Cost Efficiency

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In the era of cloud-native applications, Kubernetes has become the default standard platform for...

2025 Wrapped for Steve

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I’ve often done some analysis of my year in different ways. Last year I...

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Forums

reaching ftp thru winscp but erroring in ssis ftp task connection

By stan

Hi, below i show various results trying to reach our ftp site (a globalscape...

Finding Motivation

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Finding Motivation

The Last Binary Value of the Year

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Last Binary Value of...

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Question of the Day

The Last Binary Value of the Year

What does this code return?

SELECT cast(0x2025 AS NVARCHAR(20))
Image 1: Image 2: Image 3: Image 4:

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