James Serra's Blog

Modern Data Warehouse & Reverse ETL

• by James-Serra

• James Serra's Blog

An extension to the Modern Data Warehouse (MDW) that I have heard a bit about lately is called “Reverse ETL”. Before I describe what that is, first I wanted...

2021-04-12

8 reads

A new WordPress theme and a new job

• by James-Serra

• James Serra's Blog

As you can tell, I have switched to a new WordPress theme for this blog site. I have now been blogging for ten years! It seemed like a good...

2021-03-20

16 reads

Microsoft Ignite Announcements 2021

• by James-Serra

• James Serra's Blog

Microsoft Ignite has always announced many new products and new product features, and this year was no exception. Many exciting announcements, and below I list the major data platform and...

2021-03-10 (first published: 2021-03-04)

634 reads

Power BI and a Star Schema

• by James-Serra

• James Serra's Blog

I sometimes get asked from customers if they should use a star schema or should they use one large single table/flatfile for their dataset in Power BI. The answer...

2021-03-05 (first published: 2021-03-01)

519 reads

Data Mesh defined

• by James-Serra

• James Serra's Blog

The two latest trends in emerging data platform architectures are the Data Lakehouse (the subject of my last blog Data Lakehouse defined), and the Data Mesh, the subject of...

2021-02-19 (first published: 2021-02-16)

412 reads

Data Lakehouse defined

• by James-Serra

• James Serra's Blog

As a follow-up to my blog Data Lakehouse & Synapse, I wanted to talk about the various definitions I am seeing about what a data lakehouse is, including a...

2021-02-02 (first published: 2021-01-25)

446 reads

Syncing SQL databases

• by James-Serra

• James Serra's Blog

There are various ways to keep SQL Server databases and SQL Database/SQL Managed Instance (SQL MI) databases in-sync asynchronously that I will discuss in this blog. The main use...

2021-01-05 (first published: 2021-01-04)

553 reads

DirectQuery for Power BI datasets and Azure Analysis Services (preview)

• by James-Serra

• James Serra's Blog

Announced last week is a major new feature for Power BI: you can now use DirectQuery to connect to Azure Analysis Services or Power BI Datasets and combine it...

2021-01-01 (first published: 2020-12-23)

646 reads

New Microsoft data governance product: Azure Purview

• by James-Serra

• James Serra's Blog

Azure Purview is at data governance solution that is the sequel to the product Azure Data Catalog, and is now available in public preview. Purview catalogs data from on-premises,...

2020-12-10

66 reads

Azure Synapse Analytics is GA!

• by James-Serra

• James Serra's Blog

(Note: I will give a demo on Azure Synapse Analytics this Saturday Dec 5th at 1:10pm EST, at the PASS SQL Saturday Atlanta BI (info) (register) (full schedule)) Great...

2020-12-15 (first published: 2020-12-04)

388 reads