James Serra's Blog

Power BI connectors to Azure Synapse

• by James Serra

• James Serra's Blog

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...

2022-06-08 (first published: 2022-05-13)

205 reads

Power BI Performance Features

• by James Serra

• James Serra's Blog

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...

2022-05-04 (first published: 2022-04-25)

422 reads

Azure IoT Central

• by James Serra

• James Serra's Blog

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...

2022-04-11 (first published: 2022-03-31)

138 reads

Azure Synapse and Delta Lake

• by James Serra

• James Serra's Blog

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...

2022-03-02

103 reads

Data Lakehouse, Data Mesh, and Data Fabric 

• by James Serra

• James Serra's Blog

(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...

2022-02-08

40 reads

Microsoft industry clouds

• by James Serra

• James Serra's Blog

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...

2022-01-28 (first published: 2022-01-18)

150 reads

Distributed SQL

• by James Serra

• James Serra's Blog

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...

2022-01-07 (first published: 2021-12-29)

479 reads

Azure Synapse Analytics November updates

• by James Serra

• James Serra's Blog

Microsoft recently came out with a blog on a bunch of new features available for Azure Synapse Analytics (see Azure Synapse Analytics November 2021 Update), and I wanted to...

2021-12-20 (first published: 2021-12-09)

183 reads

Azure Synapse Analytics database templates

• by James Serra

• James Serra's Blog

One of the biggest announcements at Microsoft Ignite that seemed to be overlooked by a lot of people was Azure Synapse Analytics database templates, now in public preview. I...

2021-12-01 (first published: 2021-11-22)

198 reads

Microsoft Ignite Announcements Nov 2021

• by James Serra

• James Serra's Blog

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 and...

2021-11-12 (first published: 2021-11-03)

402 reads