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

Azure SQL offerings

There are three Azure SQL products with so many different deployment options, service tiers, and compute tiers that it can get quite confusing when choosing the right option for...

2025-03-03 (first published: )

1,205 reads

Blog Post

Cool AI sites

As I researched and wrote my OpenAI and LLMs blogs (see Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs, Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs – Part 2 and Introduction to OpenAI and...

2025-02-07 (first published: )

675 reads

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Blogs

Identity Columns Can’t Be Updated: #SQLNewBlogger

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I’m not sure I knew identity column values could not be updated. I ran...

Rolling Back a Broken Release

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We had an interesting discussion about deployments in databases and how you go forward...

A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth

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You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...

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Forums

Can someone please explain what happens?

By skeleton567

I have mentioned this several times over several years.  Can someone please help me...

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT) returns null when nothing is found instead of 0

By tim8w

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT Component) AS Found FROM tblComponents WHERE(Component NOT LIKE '%[a-z]%') AND(LTRIM(RTRIM(Component)) = 'GM13622')...

Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects: The Fabric Modern Data Platform

By John Miner

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects:...

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Question of the Day

Creating JSON III

In a SQL Server 2025 table, called Beer, I have this data: 

BeerIDBeerName
1Becks
2Fat Tire
3Mac n Jacks
4Alaskan Amber
8Kirin
I run this code: 
SELECT JSON_OBJECTAGG(
    BeerID: BeerName )
FROM beer;
What are the results?

See possible answers