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: )

409 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: )

162 reads

Blogs

Learn about Modern Microsoft Apps in San Diego

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I wrote about learning today for the editorial: I Can’t Make You Learn. I...

How To Deploy Fabric SQL and Azure SQL Databases with Azure DevOps

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Fabric has CI/CD built in, but if you've tried to use it for database...

A New Word: Attriage

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Forums

SSRS Reminded Me of the Time Microsoft Retired TMG

By Marko Coha

Comments posted to this topic are about the item SSRS Reminded Me of the...

Getting results from a Procedure to join to a query

By bswhipp

I have a need to execute a stored procedure and return the results to...

Upgrade 2016 Standard to 2022 Express

By pdanes

Title pretty much says it all - can this be done? I've tried several...

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Question of the Day

BIT_COUNT II

In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:

UserID  UserPermissions
15
23
37
4       NULL
What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount
from dbo.UserPermission
where UserID = 4;

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