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”.

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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: )

723 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: )

917 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: )

369 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: )

318 reads

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Blogs

T-SQL Tuesday #202 SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget: A Roundup

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When I put together the invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #202, I wasn't sure what...

A Last Minute Trip to the EU

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My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer...

Part 3 of 3: Tuning DiskANN — R, Alpha, L, Beam Width, Recall and Latency

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In Part 1, we saw how ‘Vamana’ represents vectors as nodes, connects them with...

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Server-Level Table sizes

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ORDER BY alias

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Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure

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Question of the Day

ORDER BY alias

There is a table tmp_tab: 

CREATE TABLE tmp_tab (
id int,
val int
);
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES
(1, 1),
(2, NULL),
(3, 3),
(4, 4),
(5, 5);
You want to order the rows ids by the following expression: 
    ISNULL(val, id) + 1
Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct)

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