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: )

891 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: )

3,002 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: )

432 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: )

1,178 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

40 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: )

718 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: )

902 reads

Blogs

Using Prompt AI for a Travel Data Analysis

By

I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt...

FinOps for Kubernetes: Leveraging OpenCost, KubeGreen, and Kubecost for Cost Efficiency

By

In the era of cloud-native applications, Kubernetes has become the default standard platform for...

2025 Wrapped for Steve

By

I’ve often done some analysis of my year in different ways. Last year I...

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Forums

reaching ftp thru winscp but erroring in ssis ftp task connection

By stan

Hi, below i show various results trying to reach our ftp site (a globalscape...

Finding Motivation

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Finding Motivation

The Last Binary Value of the Year

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Last Binary Value of...

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Question of the Day

The Last Binary Value of the Year

What does this code return?

SELECT cast(0x2025 AS NVARCHAR(20))
Image 1: Image 2: Image 3: Image 4:

See possible answers