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

Levels in IT consultancy

The Big 5 IT consulting companies (Accenture, Deloitte Consulting, PwC (formerly PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP), KPMG, Ernst & Young) have various titles given to consultants along...

2013-06-13

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Blogs

A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth

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You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...

Presenting with Visual Studio Code

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A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...

Advice I Like: In 100 Years

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In 100 years a lot of what we take to be true now will...

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Forums

AllocationType as ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA

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Hello, I inherited a number of tables with like 20-30 column using nvarchar(256) in...

connections vs apis

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hi , i hear more and more that we have too many connections to...

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Hi, i'm running vs2022.   I'm trying out a c# script that i'd like to...

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Question of the Day

Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance

I upgraded a SQL Server 2019 instance to SQL Server 2025. I wanted to test the fuzzy string search functions. I run this code:

SELECT JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE('tim', 'tom')
I get this error message:
Msg 195, Level 15, State 10, Line 1 'JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE' is not a recognized built-in function name.
What is wrong?

See possible answers