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

SQL Database MI benefits

As I see a huge number of customers migrating their on-prem databases to the Azure cloud, the main question they ask is about whether they should go with an...

2020-03-10 (first published: )

890 reads

Blog Post

Power BI Real-time Streaming

With Power BI real-time streaming, you can stream data and update dashboards in real-time. Any visual or dashboard that can be created in Power BI can also be created...

2020-02-19 (first published: )

3,001 reads

Blog Post

Azure Storage tips

As a followup to my blog post Azure Data Lake Store Gen2 is GA, I wanted to give some pointers when using ADLS Gen2 as well as blob storage,...

2020-01-24 (first published: )

432 reads

Blog Post

DevOps for databases: “DataOps”

DevOps, a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and information-technology operations (Ops), has become a very popular way to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery of...

2020-01-16 (first published: )

1,178 reads

Blog Post

My latest presentations

Just wanted to make everyone aware of my latest presentations that I recently uploaded. Details below. I also have a list of all my presentations with slide decks here.   Azure...

2019-12-04

40 reads

Blog Post

Microsoft Ignite Announcements

Microsoft Ignite has always announced many new products and new product features, and this year was no exception. Many exciting announcements, and below I list the major data platform...

2019-11-13 (first published: )

718 reads

Blog Post

Databricks Delta Lake

Introduced in April 2019, Databricks Delta Lake is, in short, a transactional storage layer that runs on top of cloud storage such as Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2...

2019-10-25 (first published: )

902 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