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: )

370 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: )

780 reads

Blogs

Claude Code Helps Analyze Test Data Manager Log Files

By

I had a customer ask about analyzing their Test Data Manager (TDM) usage to...

PowerPoint to HTML with Claude AI

By

I had an idea for an animated view of a sales tool, and started...

Don’t Miss Out – SQL Server Query Tuning Fundamentals Starts Next Monday!

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Next Monday, February 9, 2026, my one-day live online training SQL Server Query Tuning...

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Forums

SQL Server 2025 Query Performance Tuning: Troubleshoot and Optimize Query Performance

By Site Owners

Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server 2025 Query Performance...

Is it uncommon for Dev's to have a data model of the source data

By Coffee_&_SQL

This is a generic question. To the moderators, I wasn't sure where to place...

ROLLUP to calculate Month total for all Categories

By Reh23

Good Afternoon, I have built a table with four columns:  Period(Month), Category, Numerator, Denominator....

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Question of the Day

Creating JSON I

On SQL Server 2025, what happens when I run this code:

SELECT JSON_OBJECTAGG( 'City':'Denver')
GO

See possible answers