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 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: )

903 reads

Blog Post

Big Data Workshop

A challenge I have with customers who want to get hands-on experience with the Azure products that are found in a modern data warehouse architecture is finding a workshop...

2019-07-30 (first published: )

363 reads

Blog Post

The Microsoft Power Platform

The Microsoft Power Platform consists of three products: Power BI, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow. I find customers are confused on the use cases of these products and how they...

2019-07-08 (first published: )

311 reads

Blogs

A New Word: Dolorblindness

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dolorblindness – n. the frustration that you’ll never be able to understand another person’s...

Claude Code Helps Analyze Test Data Manager Log Files

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PowerPoint to HTML with Claude AI

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Case part is sloooooow

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Hi So the case statement is slowing this down - but for the life...

Why the following cmds in sequence do not work

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I need to delete rows from both the temporal main and history tables. The...

When SQL Server Central Went Down

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item When SQL Server Central Went...

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Question of the Day

The String Distance I

In SQL Server 2025, what is returned by this code:

SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE('tim', 'tom')
Assume preview features are enabled.

See possible answers