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”.

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Blog Post

Modern Data Warehouse explained

I created a short YouTube video (20 minutes) that is a whiteboarding session that describes the five stages (ingest, store, transform, model, visualize) that make up a modern data...

2021-05-12 (first published: )

1,001 reads

Blog Post

Power BI and a Star Schema

I sometimes get asked from customers if they should use a star schema or should they use one large single table/flatfile for their dataset in Power BI. The answer...

2021-03-05 (first published: )

1,009 reads

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Blogs

T-SQL Tuesday #192: What career risks have you taken?

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I’m honored to be hosting T-SQL Tuesday — edition #192. For those who may...

AI: Blog a Day – Day 3: LLM Models – Open Source vs Closed Source

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Continuing from Day 2 , we learned introduction on Generative AI and Agentic AI,...

How to Parameterize Fabric Linked Services in Azure Data Factory for Azure Devops Deployment

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Quite the title, so let me set the stage first. You have an Azure...

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Question of the Day

Fun with JSON I

I have some data in a table: 

CREATE TABLE #test_data
(
    id INT PRIMARY KEY,
    name VARCHAR(100),
    birth_date DATE
);

-- Step 2: Insert rows  
INSERT INTO #test_data
VALUES
(1, 'Olivia', '2025-01-05'),
(2, 'Emma', '2025-03-02'),
(3, 'Liam', '2025-11-15'),
(4, 'Noah', '2025-12-22');
If I run this query, how many rows are returned? 
SELECT *
FROM OPENJSON(
     (
         SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
     )
             ) t;

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