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

Power BI FAQ

Power BI has become hugely popular and I find common questions about functionality and features, so I thought I would put in this blog some of those questions with...

2020-06-23 (first published: )

611 reads

Blog Post

Monitoring Power BI

There are a number of options for monitoring Power BI that I wanted to mention: Performance analyzer: Find out how each of your report elements, such as visuals and...

2020-06-02 (first published: )

726 reads

Blog Post

Query Acceleration for ADLS

Just announced is Query Acceleration for Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS) as well as Blob Storage. This is a new capability for ADLS that enables applications and analytics...

2020-05-20 (first published: )

443 reads

Blog Post

Power BI Security

A common topic I have been discussing recently with customers is the security around Power BI. Basically, how to prevent users seeing data they shouldn’t. So I’ll discuss the...

2020-03-19 (first published: )

621 reads

Blog Post

Power BI Sharing

There are many ways to share the dashboards, reports, and datasets that you create in Power BI. Below I’ll compare all such options (there are twelve!). First make sure...

2020-03-16

79 reads

Blogs

Performance tuning KubeVirt for SQL Server

By

Following on from my last post about Getting Started With KubeVirt & SQL Server,...

T-SQL Tuesday #193 – A Note to Your Past, and a Warning from Your Future

By

I haven’t posted in a while (well, not here at least since I’ve been...

Keeping MS Docs Up to Date

By

One of the things that I like about the SQL Server docs (MS Learn...

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Forums

Change Tracking – Troubleshooting

By Phil Parkin

I have change tracking configured in several databases, in QA and production environments, and...

is there a no code way to limit an ssis extract from excel to the 1st 21 rows?

By stan

is there a no code way to limit an ssis extract from excel to...

Pivot but preserve all rows on Aggregate column

By getsaby

Hello Need help in pivoting this data set, the Pivot takes MIN/MAX on a...

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Question of the Day

What is the PRODUCT

In SQL Server 2025, what does this return?

CREATE TABLE Numbers
( n INT)
GO
INSERT dbo.Numbers
(
n
)
VALUES
(1), (2), (3)
GO
SELECT PRODUCT(n)
FROM dbo.Numbers

See possible answers