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”.

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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: )

762 reads

Blog Post

Azure SQL offerings

There are three Azure SQL products with so many different deployment options, service tiers, and compute tiers that it can get quite confusing when choosing the right option for...

2025-03-03 (first published: )

857 reads

Blog Post

Cool AI sites

As I researched and wrote my OpenAI and LLMs blogs (see Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs, Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs – Part 2 and Introduction to OpenAI and...

2025-02-07 (first published: )

626 reads

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Blogs

From Couch-Potato to Triathlete – and What This Means for Your SQL Server

By

Do you know if your SQL Server is really running at its best? To...

Retro Data 2025 – Slidedeck

By

You can find the slides of my session on the €100 DWH in Azure...

The Book of Redgate: We Value Teams

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This value is something that I still hear today: our best work is done...

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Forums

Is there a way for SP to know who called it?

By water490

Hi everyone I am writing an SP where there is logic inside the SP...

Planning for tomorrow, today - database migrations

By John Martin

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Planning for tomorrow, today -...

Bottlenecks on SQL Server performance

By runarlan

We have a BI-application that connects to input tables on a SQL Server 2022...

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Question of the Day

The Tightly Linked View

I try to run this code on SQL Server 2022. All the objects exist in the database. 

CREATE OR ALTER VIEW OrderShipping
AS
SELECT cl.CityNameID,
       cl.CityName,
       o.OrderID,
       o.Customer,
       o.OrderDate,
       o.CustomerID,
       o.cityId
 FROM dbo.CityList AS cl
 INNER JOIN dbo.[Order] AS o ON o.cityId = cl.CityNameID
GO
CREATE OR ALTER FUNCTION GetShipCityForOrder
(
    @OrderID INT
)
RETURNS VARCHAR(50)
WITH SCHEMABINDING
AS
BEGIN
    DECLARE @city VARCHAR(50);
    SELECT @city = os.CityName
    FROM dbo.OrderShipping AS os
    WHERE os.OrderID = @OrderID;
    RETURN @city;
END;
go
What is the result?

See possible answers