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

Query Acceleration for ADLS

Just announced is Query Acceleration for Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS) as well as Blob Storage. This is a new capability for ADLS that enables applications and analytics...

2020-05-20 (first published: )

445 reads

Blog Post

Power BI Security

A common topic I have been discussing recently with customers is the security around Power BI. Basically, how to prevent users seeing data they shouldn’t. So I’ll discuss the...

2020-03-19 (first published: )

625 reads

Blog Post

Power BI Sharing

There are many ways to share the dashboards, reports, and datasets that you create in Power BI. Below I’ll compare all such options (there are twelve!). First make sure...

2020-03-16

94 reads

Blog Post

SQL Database MI benefits

As I see a huge number of customers migrating their on-prem databases to the Azure cloud, the main question they ask is about whether they should go with an...

2020-03-10 (first published: )

892 reads

Blog Post

Power BI Real-time Streaming

With Power BI real-time streaming, you can stream data and update dashboards in real-time. Any visual or dashboard that can be created in Power BI can also be created...

2020-02-19 (first published: )

3,010 reads

Blog Post

Azure Storage tips

As a followup to my blog post Azure Data Lake Store Gen2 is GA, I wanted to give some pointers when using ADLS Gen2 as well as blob storage,...

2020-01-24 (first published: )

435 reads

Blog Post

DevOps for databases: “DataOps”

DevOps, a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and information-technology operations (Ops), has become a very popular way to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery of...

2020-01-16 (first published: )

1,179 reads

Blogs

Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency

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As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...

March 2026 SQL Server Security Updates

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On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...

How Fabric Mirroring Transformed with SQL Server 2025

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When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...

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Forums

Multiple Deployment Processes

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Deployment Processes

How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases

By Kunal Rathi

Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Use sqlpackage to...

Upgrading Admin Queries

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Upgrading Admin Queries

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Question of the Day

Upgrading Admin Queries

I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?  

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