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

Serving layers with a data lake

Data lakes typically have three layers: raw, cleaned, and presentation (also called bronze, silver, and gold if using the medallion architecture popularized by Databricks). I talk about this is...

2023-08-28 (first published: )

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Blogs

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Ramblings of a retired data architect Let me start by saying that I have...

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Question of the Day

Encoding URLs

I have this data in a SQL Server 2025 table: 

CREATE TABLE Response
( ResponseID INT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT ResponsePK PRIMARY KEY
, ResponseVal VARBINARY(5000)
)
GO
If I want to get a value from this table that I can add to a URL in a browser, which of these code items produces a result I can use?

See possible answers