Here's the video from my panel discussion at the Microsoft TechEd Conference. Taped on May 11th at the Los Angeles Convention Center, hear me share my experiences at FMS with two fellow software consulting firm entrepreneurs. Learn from our efforts over the past two decades, the challenges we face, and how we've been successful. Entitled Let's Talk about Software Consulting as a Business, the video is 54 minutes.

Discover how Total Access Emailer can support a table driven system to continuously send emails from your Microsoft Access application. With an instance of Microsoft Access running Total Access Emailer's programmatic interface, you can automatically send emails from a table. Create a custom email in your application and simply add it as new record to a table. The email is automatically sent without interrupting your application. Read the article for more information on how easy this is to implement.

When creating queries in Access, you may have noticed the query properties "Unique Values" and "Unique Records". Are you familiar with the difference between these properties?

"Unique Values" and "Unique Records" correspond with the DISTINCT and DISTINCTROW statements (respectively) in the query's SQL. Although they sometimes provide the same results, there are significant differences in how they work:

• DISTINCT checks for unique values only in the fields selected for output, and eliminates duplicate rows. Results are not updateable, since they do not necessarily correspond with a unique record.
• DISTINCTROW checks for unique values in all fields in the table that you are querying, not just the fields listed for output. Results are updateable, since they correspond with a single record in the underlying data.

Learn more and view an example of the differences in our new paper on Microsoft Access Queries: Distinct versus DistinctRow.

Microsoft's annual TechEd conference is being held in Los Angeles next week.  Microsoft has invited me to participate on a few panels including:

• Let's Talk about Software Consulting as a Business
• Migrating Your Data Tier to SQL Server: Strategies for Survival
• The World Turned Upside Down: Development Strategies for Lean Times

For more information, times and rooms, please visit our Upcoming Events page.  Be sure to find me up if you are there.