Azure Synapse Analytics is GA!
(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...
2020-12-04
2 reads
James Serra's Blog
PASS SQLSaturday’s I will be speaking at
I will be speaking at two upcoming PASS SQLSaturday’s. These are free events that you can attend virtually: Azure Synapse Analytics: A Data Lakehouse 12/5/20, 1:10pm EST, PASS SQL...
2020-12-02
31 reads
Azure Stack and Azure Arc for data services
For those companies that can’t yet move to the cloud, have certain workloads that can’t move to the cloud, or have limited to no internet access, Microsoft has options...
2020-12-01 (first published: 2020-11-18)
549 reads
External tables vs T-SQL views on files in a data lake
A question that I have been hearing recently from customers using Azure Synapse Analytics (the public preview version) is what is the difference between using an external table versus...
2020-11-11 (first published: 2020-11-03)
774 reads
Top Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI questions
I have listed below the top questions I see from customers about Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI, and the blogs that I have written that try to answer...
2020-10-28 (first published: 2020-10-22)
734 reads
Synapse and federated queries
As I was finishing up a demo script for my presentation at the SQL PASS Virtual Summit on 11/13 (details on my session here), I wanted to blog about...
2020-10-23 (first published: 2020-10-15)
464 reads
Microsoft Ignite Announcements 2020
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 related...
2020-10-08 (first published: 2020-09-30)
492 reads
Azure Synapse Analytics overlooked features
There are some options in Azure Synapse Analytics that are not obvious that I wanted to point out. While in Azure Synapse Studio, going to the Data hub and...
2020-09-29 (first published: 2020-09-23)
440 reads
Query options in Azure Synapse Analytics
The public preview version of Azure Synapse Analytics has three compute options and four types of storage that it can access (mentioned in my blog at SQL on-demand in...
2020-09-23 (first published: 2020-09-16)
279 reads
Data Lakehouse & Synapse
I am starting to see this relatively new phrase, “Data Lakehouse”, being used in the data platform world. It’s the combination of “Data Lake” and “Data Warehouse”. In this...
2020-09-17 (first published: 2020-09-10)
783 reads
Blogs
Presenting with Visual Studio Code
A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...
Advice I Like: In 100 Years
By Steve Jones
In 100 years a lot of what we take to be true now will...
dataMinds Saturday 2026 – Slides
At Saturday the 21st of February I’m presenting an introduction to dimensional modelling at...
Forums
AllocationType as ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA
Hello, I inherited a number of tables with like 20-30 column using nvarchar(256) in...
is it true we cant debug c# scripts in ssis anymore under vs
Hi, i'm running vs2022. I'm trying out a c# script that i'd like to...
Question of the Day
Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance
I upgraded a SQL Server 2019 instance to SQL Server 2025. I wanted to test the fuzzy string search functions. I run this code:
SELECT JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE('tim', 'tom')
I get this error message:Msg 195, Level 15, State 10, Line 1 'JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE' is not a recognized built-in function name.What is wrong? See possible answers