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 industry clouds

In talking with Microsoft customers, I have found that most are not aware that Microsoft has created industry clouds (see Microsoft Industry Clouds). So I wanted to use this...

2022-01-28 (first published: )

161 reads

Blog Post

Distributed SQL

A very brief history of databases for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads starts with relational databases (RDBMS), which worked well for many years. With the advent of the internet and...

2022-01-07 (first published: )

537 reads

Blogs

Finding Balance: Things Will Come Up

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I have a presentation on finding balance in your career that got quite a...

Who Are You Doing It For?

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But as I've matured over the years, I came to realize that I needed...

Presenting Twice in May 2026

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I will be presenting my latest session, Documenting Your Work for Worry-Free Vacations, in-person...

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Forums

The day-to-day pressures of a DBA team, and how we can work smarter with automation and AI

By Terry Jago

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The day-to-day pressures of a...

How to change the FDLaunch Error log file location

By schleep

The file FDLAUNCHERRORLOG gets created in the default <instance>\MSSQL\Log folder. So far, I've found...

what data type i should use for roversion col and can i use less than greater

By rajemessage 14195

can i use Rowversioncol ( in my database it's synonyme timestamp is used) to...

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Question of the Day

A Fun Computer Quote

Which movie featured this quote?

"All programs have a desire to be useful."
Happy April Fools!

See possible answers