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: )

244 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: )

373 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

Identity Columns Can’t Be Updated: #SQLNewBlogger

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I’m not sure I knew identity column values could not be updated. I ran...

Rolling Back a Broken Release

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We had an interesting discussion about deployments in databases and how you go forward...

A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth

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You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...

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Forums

Can someone please explain what happens?

By skeleton567

I have mentioned this several times over several years.  Can someone please help me...

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT) returns null when nothing is found instead of 0

By tim8w

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT Component) AS Found FROM tblComponents WHERE(Component NOT LIKE '%[a-z]%') AND(LTRIM(RTRIM(Component)) = 'GM13622')...

Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects: The Fabric Modern Data Platform

By John Miner

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects:...

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Question of the Day

Creating JSON III

In a SQL Server 2025 table, called Beer, I have this data:

BeerIDBeerName
1Becks
2Fat Tire
3Mac n Jacks
4Alaskan Amber
8Kirin
I run this code:
SELECT JSON_OBJECTAGG(
    BeerID: BeerName )
FROM beer;
What are the results?

See possible answers