James Serra

James works at Microsoft as a big data and data warehousing solution architect where he has been for most of the last nine years. He is a thought leader in the use and application of Big Data and advanced analytics, including data architectures such as the modern data warehouse, data lakehouse, data fabric, and data mesh. Previously he was an independent consultant working as a Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence architect and developer. He is a prior SQL Server MVP with over 35 years of IT experience. He is a popular blogger (JamesSerra.com) and speaker, having presented at dozens of major events including SQLBits, PASS Summit, Data Summit and the Enterprise Data World conference. He is the author of the book “Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh”.

Blog Post

Fabric Cost Analysis (FCA)

Monitoring costs in Microsoft Fabric can be trickier than it first appears. You might assume it’s just a flat fee per capacity (easy, right?), but real-world usage tends to...

2026-02-23 (first published: )

285 reads

Blog Post

Microsoft Ignite Announcements Nov 2025

Announced at Microsoft Ignite two weeks ago were many new product features related to the data platform. Check out the Major announcements and Book of News. I went through the many announcements and picked...

2025-12-10 (first published: )

375 reads

Blogs

AI: Blog a Day – Day 6: Embeddings – How AI Understands

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Continuing from Day 5 where we covered notebooks, HuggingFace and fine tuning AI now...

The Book of Redgate: Mistakes

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This is kind of a funny page to look at. The next page has...

ADF Pipeline Debugging Fails with BadRequest – The Sequel

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A while ago I blogged about a use case where a pipeline fails during...

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Forums

Dynamic Unpivot

By pietlinden

I have a table I didn't design that has tons of repeating groups in...

Writing as an Art and a Job

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Writing as an Art and...

String Similarity II

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item String Similarity II

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Question of the Day

String Similarity II

What is the range for the result from the EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY() function in SQL Server 2025?

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