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

SQL Database MI benefits

As I see a huge number of customers migrating their on-prem databases to the Azure cloud, the main question they ask is about whether they should go with an...

2020-03-10 (first published: )

878 reads

Blog Post

Power BI Real-time Streaming

With Power BI real-time streaming, you can stream data and update dashboards in real-time. Any visual or dashboard that can be created in Power BI can also be created...

2020-02-19 (first published: )

2,991 reads

Blog Post

Azure Storage tips

As a followup to my blog post Azure Data Lake Store Gen2 is GA, I wanted to give some pointers when using ADLS Gen2 as well as blob storage,...

2020-01-24 (first published: )

425 reads

Blog Post

DevOps for databases: “DataOps”

DevOps, a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and information-technology operations (Ops), has become a very popular way to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery of...

2020-01-16 (first published: )

1,167 reads

Blog Post

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

35 reads

Blog Post

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: )

713 reads

Blog Post

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: )

894 reads

Blogs

Can I Change a Primary Key Value? #SQLNewBlogger

By

I heard someone say recently that you can’t change a primary key value in...

SQL Server Index Primer

By

Indexes 101: What, Why, and When? “What Is an Index?” I get this question...

Secure Azure SQL Server Backups Using Managed Identities

By

I do believe most people know about the ability to backup your SQL server...

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Forums

Just a rant about the SQL Server 2022 upgrade

By cphite

Upgrading an instance of SQL Server 2019 to SQL Server 2022 - I am...

Report Server Configuration Manager - The target principal name is incorrect SSL

By JDRocket

SQL Server SSRS 2022. Running into ' SSL Provider, error: 0 - The target...

Report Server Configuration Manager - Change Database - SSL Error

By JDRocket

SQL Server SSRS 2022. Running into ' SSL Provider, error: 0 - The target...

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Question of the Day

Getting the TEXTSIZE

How can I check what value I used for TEXTSIZE? I ran this code:

SET TEXTSIZE 8096
But then deleted the code and couldn't remember. Is there a way to check this?

See possible answers