James works at Microsoft as a big data and data warehousing solution architect where he has been for most of the last ten years. Before that 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. Check out his book Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh.
Happy new year to everyone! As I enter my 9th year at Microsoft, I have switched roles, and am now an Industry Advisor in Federal Civilian, helping our Federal Civilian customers deliver on their missions through the Microsoft cloud. Microsoft … Continue reading →
Over the years I have presented a ton (see the list), and some of those presentations were recorded. I had put some of them on my YouTube channel, but neglected to post some of them (13 in fact). They are … Continue reading →
The big announcement at the PASS Data Community Summit 2022 was that SQL Server 2022 is now generally available. See the official announcement. My top 10 list of new features are: Integration with Azure SQL Database Managed Instance — the Microsoft-managed, cloud-based … Continue reading →
I have attended and presented at a ton of conferences over the years (see the entire list at Presentations | James Serra’s Blog). If you are looking to learn a lot about the Microsoft data platform, the two biggest conferences … Continue reading →
Announced at Microsoft Ignite were some new product features related to data platform and AI. Below are the ones I found most interesting: Azure Cosmos DB adds distributed PostgreSQL support: Azure Cosmos DB now brings fast, flexible and scalable service … Continue reading →
I have had a lot of conversations with customers to help them understand how to design a data lake. I touched on this in my blog Data lake details, but that was written a long time ago so I wanted … Continue reading →
I had previously blogged about Azure Synapse Analytics database templates, and wanted to follow-up with some notes and tips on that feature as I have been using it a lot lately: Purview does not yet pull in the metadata for … Continue reading →
(Side note: There is a “subscribe” button on the right side of my home page if you wish to receive my blogs updates via email as soon as they are published). I have been asked a number of times on … Continue reading →
Recently there has been a number of great articles published on Power BI that I wanted to make you aware of that go beyond the features descriptions found in the Power BI documentation. These new articles fall under the Power … Continue reading →
When I’m leading a full-day architecture design session (ADS) with a customer and the goal is to come up with a data architecture for them, I first start doing “discovery” with them for at least a couple of hours so … Continue reading →
With Power BI continuing to get many great new features, including the latest in Datamarts (see my blog Power BI Datamarts), I’m starting to hear customers ask “Can I just build my entire enterprise data warehouse solution in Power BI”? … Continue reading →
As mentioned in my previous blog about the Microsoft Build event announcements, the biggest news was Power BI Datamarts. This is a new self-service capability included with Power BI Premium (premium capacity or per user) that enables users to uncover … Continue reading →
There were a number of data platform announcements at Microsoft Build yesterday that I wanted to blog about. Everything announced at Build can be found in the Microsoft Build 2022 Book of News. Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform. This is not a … Continue reading →
When using Power BI and pulling data from Azure Synapse, you will use the “Get Data” feature in Power BI. There are now three connections that you can use that I will cover in this blog. But first, a review … Continue reading →
It’s hard to believe but Power BI has now been available for over 10 years (see history)! Over the last few years there have been a number of new features to improve the performance of queries for dashboards and reports, … Continue reading →
This is a short blog to give you a high-level overview on a product called Azure IoT Central. I saw this fairly new Azure product (GA Sept 2018) in use for the first time at a large manufacturing company who … Continue reading →
Many companies are seeing the value in collecting data to help them make better business decisions. When building a solution in Azure to collect the data, nearly everyone is using a data lake. A majority of those are also using … Continue reading →
(NOTE: I have returned to Microsoft and am working as a Solution Architect in Microsoft Industry Solutions, formally known as Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS), where I help customers build solutions on Azure. Contact your Microsoft account executive for more info. … Continue reading →
In talking with Microsoft customers, I have found that most are not aware that Microsoft has created industry clouds (see Microsoft Industry Clouds). So I wanted to use this blog to briefly explain what they are and how they may … Continue reading →
A very brief history of databases for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads starts with relational databases (RDBMS), which worked well for many years. With the advent of the internet and the need for millions of transactions per second, NoSQL filled that … Continue reading →