Getting Your Data GenAI-Ready: The Next Stage of Data Maturity
I remember a meeting where a client’s CEO leaned in and asked me, “So, we have tons of data… Why can’t we just add AI and call it a...
2026-01-14
25 reads
James Serra's Blog
Fabric Cost Analysis (FCA)
Monitoring costs in Microsoft Fabric can be trickier than it first appears. You might assume it’s just a flat fee per capacity (easy, right?), but real-world usage tends to...
2025-12-24
11 reads
Microsoft Ignite Announcements Nov 2025
Announced at Microsoft Ignite two weeks ago were many new product features related to the data platform. Check out the Major announcements and Book of News. I went through the many announcements and picked...
2025-12-10 (first published: 2025-12-02)
364 reads
Starting Your First Data Warehouse: A Practical Learning Guide
I had a great question asked of me the other day and thought I would turn the answer into a blog post. The question is “I’m an experienced DBA...
2025-11-12
11 reads
Microsoft Purview: The Key Benefits of Data Governance
I still see a lot of confusion about the functionality of Microsoft Purview ever since multiple products were combined into it, so I wanted to write this blog to...
2025-11-10 (first published: 2025-10-15)
615 reads
Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference
A bunch of new features for Microsoft Fabric were announced at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference (FabCon Vienna) recently. Here are all the new features that I found most interesting, with...
2025-10-17 (first published: 2025-09-24)
1,602 reads
New AI capabilities in SQL Server 2025
(Side note: Excited to share that the audio version of my book “Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh” is...
2025-10-01 (first published: 2025-09-09)
587 reads
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: 2025-08-19)
779 reads
Microsoft Fabric shortcut‑based AI transformations
A new feature has just been released in Microsoft Fabric that I was so impressed with that I decided to blog about it. Available in public preview is the...
2025-07-23
15 reads
Becoming a Presenter: My Journey and Tips
I still remember my very first presentation many years ago. Someone in my team asked me to demo a project I’d been working on, and I was absolutely terrified....
2025-06-17
12 reads
Blogs
Learning from Mistakes: T-SQL Tuesday #194
By Steve Jones
We’re a week late, once again my fault. I was still coming out of...
Stupid Things I Did With AI: ASCII Art
By Steve Jones
I ran across this article recently (https://www.gatesnotes.com/meet-bill/source-code/reader/microsoft-original-source-code) and it has a great opening piece...
Simple Talks Podcasting in 2026
By Steve Jones
I’m in the UK today, having arrived this morning in London. Hopefully, by this...
Forums
Learning From Breakage
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Python in Action to Auto-Generate an Optimized PostgreSQL Index Strategy
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Python in Action to Auto-Generate...
Adding and Dropping Columns I
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Adding and Dropping Columns I
Question of the Day
Adding and Dropping Columns I
I have this table in my SQL Server 2022 database:
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CityList] ( [CityNameID] [int] NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1), [CityName] [varchar] (30) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GOI decide to add two new columns for the StateProvince and Country. What code should I use? See possible answers