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
13 reads
James Serra's Blog
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
28 reads
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)
715 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)
352 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)
7,349 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)
1,202 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)
674 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
27 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)
617 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)
336 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
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...
Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance
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