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 IoT Operations

I want to talk about a fairly new product that you may not be aware of: Azure IoT Operations, which GA’d last November (it was first announced at Ignite...

2025-09-03 (first published: )

780 reads

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: )

1,208 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: )

676 reads

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Blogs

AI: Blog a Day – Day 8: RAG – Retrieval Augmented Generation

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RAG — Retrieval Augmented Generation. we have covered so far — embeddings, vectors, vector...

AI: Blog a Day – Day 7: Vector and Vector Databases

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Continuing from Day 6 we learned Embeddings, Semantic Search and Checks, on Day 7...

AI: Blog a Day – Day 6: Embeddings – How AI Understands

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Continuing from Day 5 where we covered notebooks, HuggingFace and fine tuning AI now...

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Forums

Not Just an Upgrade

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Not Just an Upgrade

Restoring On Top I

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Restoring On Top I

Designing Delta Tables with Liquid Clustering: Real-World Patterns for Data Engineers

By mehul.bhuva@gmail.com

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Designing Delta Tables with Liquid...

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Question of the Day

Restoring On Top I

I am doing development work on a database and want to keep a backup so I can reset my database. I make some changes and want to restore over top of my changes. When I run this code, what happens? 

USE Master
BACKUP DATABASE DNRTest TO DISK = 'dnrtest.bak'
GO

USE DNRTest
GO
CREATE TABLE MyTest(myid INT)
GO
USE master
RESTORE DATABASE DNRTest FROM DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' WITH REPLACE

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