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

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: )

399 reads

Blog Post

Data Marketplace

I question I have been getting from customers lately is about a data marketplace. What is it, and what products can I use to build it? A data marketplace,...

2023-04-24 (first published: )

158 reads

Blog Post

New Microsoft Purview features

Microsoft Purview, formally called Azure Purview (see Azure Purview is generally available) has recently released a number of new cool features. I wanted to call out a few of...

2023-02-22 (first published: )

438 reads

Blogs

Blog a Day – Day 1: History of AI

By

it has been a year since i have not written much on the blog...

A New Word: on tenderhooks

By

on tenderhooks – adj. feeling the primal satisfaction of being needed by someone, which...

Ramblings about data communities and your contributions, no excuses

By

I have been active in the data community throughout my career. I have met...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Ola Hallengren Index Optimize Maintenance can we have data compression = page

By JSB_89

I have a quick question on Ola Hallengren Index Optimize Maintenance . Do we...

how do i map the "current" object entry in for each to one variable

By stan

hi, in an ssis  for each loop over an object variable called MyListVariable, i...

Simulating Mercury’s Orbital Motion Using Pure T-SQL (NASA 2025 Dataset)

By NKTgLaw

SQL Server is typically viewed as a transactional or analytical database engine. However, it...

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

String Similarity I

On SQL Server 2025, when I run this, what is returned?

SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY('SQL Server', 'MySQL')

See possible answers