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

Introduction to Hadoop

Hadoop was created by the Apache foundation as an open-source software framework capable of processing large amounts of heterogeneous data-sets in...

2014-03-11 (first published: )

8,329 reads

Blog Post

PolyBase explained

PolyBase is a new technology that integrates Microsoft’s MPP product, SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), with Hadoop.  It is designed to...

2014-02-25 (first published: )

18,169 reads

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Blogs

Don’t Miss Out – SQL Server 2025 Unleashed Training Starts Next Monday!

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Next Monday, March 9, 2026, my one-day live online training SQL Server 2025 Unleashed:...

What is ALM in Fabric?

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As someone who’s worked with data for over 20 years and with many cloud...

The Most Successful Startups in 2025 — And What They Have in Common

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2025 belongs to the AI startups. If you peek into the tech headlines, you’ll...

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Forums

A Quick Restore

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Guarding Against SQL Injection at the Database Layer (SQL Server)

By tedo

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Guarding Against SQL Injection at...

Ola Hallengren Index Optimize Maintenance can we have data compression = page

By JSB_89

I have a quick question on Ola Hallengren Index Optimize Maintenance . Do we...

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Question of the Day

A Quick Restore

While doing some testing of an application, I wanted to reset my environment after doing some testing with this code: 

USE DNRTest

BACKUP DATABASE DNRTest TO DISK = 'dnrtest.bak'
GO
/*
Bunch of stuff tested here
*/RESTORE DATABASE DNRTest FROM DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' WITH REPLACE
What happens if this runs, assuming the "bunch of stuff" isn't anything affecting the instance.

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