Attending and presenting at conferences
I have attended and presented at a ton of conferences over the years (see the entire list at Presentations | James Serra’s Blog). If you are looking to learn...
2022-11-10
10 reads
James Serra's Blog
Microsoft Ignite Announcements Oct 2022
Announced at Microsoft Ignite were some new product features related to data platform and AI. Below are the ones I found most interesting: Azure Cosmos DB adds distributed PostgreSQL...
2022-10-18
18 reads
Data lake architecture
I have had a lot of conversations with customers to help them understand how to design a data lake. I touched on this in my blog Data lake details,...
2022-09-30
35 reads
Synapse database templates info and tips
I had previously blogged about Azure Synapse Analytics database templates, and wanted to follow-up with some notes and tips on that feature as I have been involved on a...
2022-09-13
26 reads
How to keep up with technology
(Side note: There is a “subscribe” button on the right side of my home page if you wish to receive my blogs updates via email as soon as they...
2022-09-12 (first published: 2022-08-29)
413 reads
Power BI guidance documentation
Recently there has been a number of great articles published on Power BI that I wanted to make you aware of that go beyond the features descriptions found in...
2022-08-29 (first published: 2022-08-09)
555 reads
Questions to ask when designing a data architecture
When I’m leading a full-day architecture design session (ADS) with a customer and the goal is to come up with a data architecture for them, I first start doing...
2022-08-08 (first published: 2022-07-26)
697 reads
Power BI as a enterprise data warehouse solution?
With Power BI continuing to get many great new features, including the latest in Datamarts (see my blog Power BI Datamarts), I’m starting to hear customers ask “Can I...
2022-07-20 (first published: 2022-06-30)
559 reads
Power BI Datamarts
As mentioned in my previous blog about the Microsoft Build event announcements, the biggest news was Power BI Datamarts. This is a new self-service capability included with Power BI...
2022-06-29 (first published: 2022-06-08)
474 reads
Microsoft Build event announcements
There were a number of data platform announcements at Microsoft Build yesterday that I wanted to blog about. Everything announced at Build can be found in the Microsoft Build 2022...
2022-06-20 (first published: 2022-05-25)
253 reads
Blogs
Using SQL Compare with Redgate Data Modeler
By Steve Jones
Redgate recently released SQL Compare v16, which included a new feature to work with...
Who’s the Winningest Coach (with AI Help)
By Steve Jones
I was listening to the radio the other day and the hosts were discussing...
Learning from Mistakes: T-SQL Tuesday #194
By Steve Jones
We’re a week late, once again my fault. I was still coming out of...
Forums
Azure-SSIS, Self-Hosted Integration Runtime, & Data Gateway?
Looking to confirm my understanding of these three products and how they can be...
Basic Always On Groups Randomly Stop Synchronizing
In one of my environments I have 3 pairs of Always On SQL 2022...
Learning From Breakage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Learning From Breakage
Question of the Day
Adding and Dropping Columns I
I have this table in my SQL Server 2022 database:
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CityList] ( [CityNameID] [int] NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1), [CityName] [varchar] (30) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GOI decide to add two new columns for the StateProvince and Country. What code should I use? See possible answers