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

Fabric Cost Analysis (FCA)

Monitoring costs in Microsoft Fabric can be trickier than it first appears. You might assume it’s just a flat fee per capacity (easy, right?), but real-world usage tends to...

2026-02-23 (first published: )

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Blog Post

Microsoft Ignite Announcements Nov 2025

Announced at Microsoft Ignite two weeks ago were many new product features related to the data platform. Check out the Major announcements and Book of News. I went through the many announcements and picked...

2025-12-10 (first published: )

390 reads

Blogs

Five Ways Redshift Serverless Quietly Eats Your Budget

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It is Friday, the queries are running, and nobody is watching the bill. That...

A Career of Memories

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Annabel retired from Redgate Software this week. Across most of my career at Redgate,...

Rethinking Index Maintenance: Why avg_fragmentation_in_percent Is Outdated and What You Should Do Instead

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As a SQL Server DBA with years of experience tuning production environments, I’ve seen...

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Forums

Changes, Happiness, and a Few Tears

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Changes, Happiness, and a Few...

BCP on Linux

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item BCP on Linux

You Probably Don't Need a Vector Database

By Kumar Abhishek

Comments posted to this topic are about the item You Probably Don't Need a...

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Question of the Day

BCP on Linux

When running bcp on Linux, what is the field terminator?

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