Microsoft Build announcements
Once again there were a number of Microsoft Build announcements related to data and AI, and some were very impressive. Below are my favorites. Everything announced at Build can...
2025-05-22
1 reads
James Serra's Blog
Deciphering Data Architectures: When to Use a Warehouse, Fabric, Lakehouse, or Mesh
As discussed in my blog and book “Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh” (Amazon), organizations are often challenged with...
2025-05-28 (first published: 2025-05-06)
405 reads
Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference
A ton of new features for Microsoft Fabric were announced at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference recently. Here are all the new features that I found most interesting, with some...
2025-04-23 (first published: 2025-04-09)
330 reads
Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric
In today’s data-driven world, organizations need the ability to analyze and act on data as it flows in real time. Microsoft Fabric provides a powerful ecosystem for real-time intelligence,...
2025-03-24 (first published: 2025-03-12)
7,217 reads
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: 2025-02-18)
599 reads
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: 2025-01-29)
579 reads
Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs – Part 3
My previous blog posts on this topic were Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs, the “what” part (what is OpenAI and LLM), and the “how” part Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs –...
2025-01-09
9 reads
Ways to land data into Fabric OneLake
Microsoft Fabric is rapidly gaining popularity as a unified data platform, leveraging OneLake as its central data storage hub for all Fabric-integrated products. A variety of tools and methods...
2024-12-18 (first published: 2024-12-12)
396 reads
Microsoft Ignite Announcements Nov 2024
Announced at Microsoft Ignite last week were some new product features related to the data platform and AI. Check out the Major announcements and Book of News. Below are...
2024-12-06 (first published: 2024-11-26)
324 reads
Benefits of Migrating from Azure Synapse Analytics to Microsoft Fabric
Many customers ask me about the advantages of moving from Azure Synapse Analytics to Microsoft Fabric. Here’s a breakdown of the standout features that make Fabric an appealing choice:...
2024-11-25 (first published: 2024-11-06)
306 reads
Blogs
Delta Lake over Spark Connect
By Ed Elliott
All Spark Connect Posts I have just finished an update for the spark connect dotnet...
Generating Random Strings with GenAI
By Steve Jones
One of the things I’ve been experimenting with in AI is taking things other...
Heading to SQL Bits 2025
By Steve Jones
I’ll be at SQL Bits tomorrow, Saturday Jun 20, 2025 for the final day...
Forums
Merge techniques
In Azure SQL DB, i want to merge records from the staging table to...
SSRS error: The Value for the image 'Image1' has a constant value...
Full error message: SSRS error: The Value for the image 'Image1' has a constant...
XML_COMPRESSION for existing tables
We are in the process of upgrading to SQL Server 2022 and would like...
Question of the Day
Adding Defaults
I have a table, called dbo.logger, in SQL Server 2022. I decide to add two new columns to this table with this code.
ALTER TABLE dbo.logger ADD CreateDate DATETIME CONSTRAINT dfGetDate DEFAULT GETDATE() GO ALTER TABLE dbo.logger ADD ModifyDate DATETIME DEFAULT dfGetDate GOWhat happens when I run these two batches? See possible answers