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: )

1,261 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: )

695 reads

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Blogs

A Last Minute Trip to the EU

By

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...

Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework

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I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...

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Server-Level Table sizes

By Artur Sanin

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Server-Level Table sizes

ORDER BY alias

By aniap

Comments posted to this topic are about the item ORDER BY alias

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

By vgupta

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...

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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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