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

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: )

601 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: )

579 reads

Blogs

Simplify Kubernetes Security With Kyverno and OPA Gatekeeper

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Here’s how these tools can make Kubernetes security easier and help you avoid common...

A New Word: Lackout

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lackout – n. the sudden awareness that you’re finally over someone, noticing that the...

Delta Lake over Spark Connect

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All Spark Connect Posts I have just finished an update for the spark connect dotnet...

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Forums

Shades and Reflecting on SQLBits and the Bright Future of Data

By dbakevlar

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Shades and Reflecting on SQLBits...

Merge techniques

By purushotham.k9

In Azure SQL DB, i want to merge records from the staging table to...

SSRS error: The Value for the image 'Image1' has a constant value...

By sgmunson

Full error message: SSRS error: The Value for the image 'Image1' has a constant...

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Question of the Day

Adding Defaults

I have a table, called dbo.logger, in SQL Server 2022. I decide to add two new columns to this table with this code.

ALTER TABLE dbo.logger ADD CreateDate DATETIME CONSTRAINT dfGetDate DEFAULT GETDATE()
GO
ALTER TABLE dbo.logger ADD ModifyDate DATETIME DEFAULT dfGetDate
GO
What happens when I run these two batches?

See possible answers