My latest presentations
Just wanted to make everyone aware of my latest presentations that I recently uploaded. Details below. I also have a list of all my presentations with slide decks here. Azure...
2019-12-04
41 reads
James Serra's Blog
Azure Synapse Analytics new features
Almost lost in all the announcements from Ignite was a bunch of amazing new features that were added to the Provisioned Resources/SQL Pool section (read SQLDW functionalities) side of...
2019-11-19 (first published: 2019-11-11)
529 reads
Microsoft Ignite Announcements
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...
2019-11-13 (first published: 2019-11-06)
719 reads
Databricks Delta Lake
Introduced in April 2019, Databricks Delta Lake is, in short, a transactional storage layer that runs on top of cloud storage such as Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2...
2019-10-25 (first published: 2019-10-15)
903 reads
Ways to access data in ADLS Gen2
With data lakes becoming popular, and Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) Gen2 being used for many of them, a common question I am asked about is “How can I...
2019-09-16
546 reads
New product: Azure Data Share
A brand new product by Microsoft called Azure Data Share was recently announced. It is in public preview. To explain the product in short, any data which resides in...
2019-08-29 (first published: 2019-08-19)
670 reads
Podcasts on Modern Data Warehouse
I did a couple of recent podcasts that I wanted to mention: The first one was with Kirby Repko from the YouTube channel SQLTalk: Modern Data Warehouse Design with...
2019-08-23 (first published: 2019-08-08)
481 reads
Top SQL Server migration questions
Below are the top 12 questions I am seeing from customers looking to migrate on-prem SQL Server to Azure, and the blogs that I have wrote that try to...
2019-07-29
71 reads
Top Modern Data Warehouse questions
Below are the top 15 questions I am seeing from customers looking to build a modern data warehouse in the cloud, and the blogs that I have wrote that...
2019-07-22
969 reads
Big Data Workshop
A challenge I have with customers who want to get hands-on experience with the Azure products that are found in a modern data warehouse architecture is finding a workshop...
2019-07-30 (first published: 2019-07-10)
363 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