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 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: )

626 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

96 reads

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: )

894 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: )

3,017 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: )

435 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: )

1,185 reads

Blogs

SQL Server instance metadata inventory with PowerShell and SMO

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SQL Server instance metadata inventory with PowerShell and SMO The purpose...

5 SQL Tricks Worth Remembering Before You Close the Laptop

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Claude Context Window

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Every Claude conversation has a context window. It is the total amount of text...

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Forums

Celebrating 30 years of PostgreSQL, A Thank you message

By Pat Wright

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Celebrating 30 years of PostgreSQL,...

provisioning sql server via VMware Cloud Foundation

By andreas.kreuzberg

Hello, has anyone here ever provisioned and actually used an MS SQL Server with...

No More Deadlocks

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item No More Deadlocks

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Question of the Day

No More Deadlocks

After detecting deadlocks in SQL Server 2025 and lowering the time threshold for detecting future issues, when does the Database Engine return to the 5s default interval?

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