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

Fabric Cost Analysis (FCA)

Monitoring costs in Microsoft Fabric can be trickier than it first appears. You might assume it’s just a flat fee per capacity (easy, right?), but real-world usage tends to...

2026-02-23 (first published: )

346 reads

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: )

381 reads

Blogs

T-SQL Tuesday #197 – An impactful session or two from a conference – RECAP

By

Thanks to everyone who joined the blog party this month. I noticed three themes...

OpenClaw- Agentic Engineering

By

This week has training on AI – Cyber security experts – Omar Santos and...

Visualising Vectors in High Dimensional Space

By

Following on from my previous post on building The Burrito Bot, I want to...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

What's new in R 4.6

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item What's new in R 4.6

Interesting Changes in R

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Interesting Changes in R, which...

PostgreSQL String Functions Part 1

By Shivayan Mukherjee

Comments posted to this topic are about the item PostgreSQL String Functions Part 1

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Identities and Sequences V

When thinking about the identity property and sequence objects, which of these can generate values before an insert statement is executed?

See possible answers