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

Microsoft industry clouds

In talking with Microsoft customers, I have found that most are not aware that Microsoft has created industry clouds (see Microsoft Industry Clouds). So I wanted to use this...

2022-01-28 (first published: )

164 reads

Blog Post

Distributed SQL

A very brief history of databases for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads starts with relational databases (RDBMS), which worked well for many years. With the advent of the internet and...

2022-01-07 (first published: )

537 reads

Blogs

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Question of the Day

BIT_COUNT II

In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:

UserID  UserPermissions
15
23
37
4       NULL
What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount
from dbo.UserPermission
where UserID = 4;

See possible answers