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

Understanding Fabric Ontology

What problem is Fabric Ontology trying to solve? For years, most data conversations have started with tables. We ask where the data lives, what columns are available, how the...

2026-06-10 (first published: )

299 reads

Blog Post

Understanding Fabric MCP

Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is one of those technical ideas that sounds more complicated than it really is. The easiest way to think about it is this: MCP...

2026-05-20 (first published: )

438 reads

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Blogs

Prime Day Recommendations

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It’s Prime Day. A few of my recommendations, since I want to do some...

Fabric for Operational Reporting & SQL Endpoint Trap

By

With Fabric Mirroring, Microsoft is promoting a nice and appealing story for operational reporting...

Crawl, Walk, Run with Agentic Development of Power BI Assets

By

If you’ve been watching AI roll through the data community and thinking, “this seems...

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Forums

SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About

By Terry Jago

Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...

Concurrency and Baseline Control: Level 5 of the Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments

By Massimo Preitano

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Concurrency and Baseline Control: Level...

Spending Time in the Office

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Spending Time in the Office

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Question of the Day

Multiple Values Inserted

I have this code on SQL Server 2022. What happens when it runs all at once? 

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.Commission
GO
CREATE TABLE dbo.Commission
(id INT NOT NULL IDENTITY(1,1) CONSTRAINT CommissionPK PRIMARY KEY
, salesperson VARCHAR(20)
, commission VARCHAR(20)
)
GO
INSERT dbo.Commission
( salesperson, commission)
VALUES
( 'Brian', 12 ),
( 'Brian', 'None' )
GO
 

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