Our long time client Kathy Korman Frey, George Washington University School of Business professor and GWU Entrepreneur in Residence, has engaged the FMS Professional Solutions Group again to update her HotMommas Project case study competition website and create another brand new website. Professor Frey has amassed the world's largest public domain collection of women's case studies, and created an environment where these women can share their experiences and challenges of creating and running companies along with juggling family and other commitments in life.

This effort is almost complete and we'll be unveiling the revamped case study competition website as well as the new "sister" site next month. Stay tuned!

The purpose of the SQL UNION query is to combine the results of two or more queries into a single result set. The list contains all the rows belonging to all the queries in the union. This applies to queries in SQL Server or Microsoft Access. A common question is whether to use the UNION or UNION ALL syntax.

The main difference between UNION ALL and UNION is that, UNION only selects distinct values and sorts the results, while UNION ALL selects all values (including duplicates) without sorting. Read our revised paper on UNION versus UNION ALL SQL Syntax to learn more about the differences, see some examples, and understand why you would use one versus the other.

For more tips and using queries, visit our Microsoft Access Query Help Center.

Since our beginning in 1986, we've served large organizations with our leading-edge solutions designed to help people make better data-based decisions. Whether it's on PC desktops, networks, the Internet, and more recently mobile devices, we recognize you need to have the data you need, where and when you need it, in a format that helps you make decisions and avoid mistakes. We also understand the challenges of balancing application functionality with the cost and requirements of regulators, auditors, and enterprise IT.

Our general philosophy is to quickly create sophisticated solutions built on a solid database foundation. Designed to scale and expand, our solutions evolve as your business demands it. Sometimes we can anticipate future needs in our design, but more often, the application evolves based on unforeseen events such as changes in the economy, regulations, new products and customers, or competitive pressure. With our staff of experienced developers, we can quickly adapt our solutions to meet your needs. Rapid development and deployment, fail quickly and cheaply, and water and nurture the seeds that grow and justify additional investment.

We understand the needs of large organizations and deliver the quality you demand. FMS products are used by tens of thousands of customers in over 100 countries including 90 of the Fortune 100.

Learn more about our experience and services to large organizations in our new page Consulting Services and Custom Software Solutions for Large Businesses.

To find out how we can help your organization, please contact us for a Risk-Free Assessment.

The Enterprise Features web site highlight's FMS President Luke Chung's discussion about why Microsoft Access is underrated and hated in large enterprise organizations.

He discusses the dynamics of IT departments in large organizations and their natural conflict with the needs and budgets of information worker. He also shows how organizations that understand the strengths and weaknesses of Microsoft Access can leverage its power for competitive advantage, and how to structure service levels to do so.

There is a persistent myth that Microsoft Access Jet databases can only support 20 or so users. Here's my response to a recent inquiry:

I question the data for the limitations on the number of Access users being around 30. We've run many tests and have never seen that kind of degradation in performance. It's a myth from Access 2.0 days that was eliminated with Access 97 over a decade ago. A well designed Access database can support hundreds of users. Of course, what matters is the number of simultaneous users, and what they're doing.

If everyone is just viewing data or entering data into a table, that takes very little work and a large number of people (well over 200) can be supported. People cannot type faster than what Access can handle. If they are all running massive reports and queries with data updates, that can still be done but performance would be an issue which applies to any technology, so testing and optimization would be necessary.

If the back-end database is in SQL Server rather than an Access/Jet database, the number of users can be practically unlimited if each user has their own front-end copy of the Access application. Performance issues still apply based on what they are doing. In some cases SQL Server is slower than Access, so it is important to understand the situation before thinking SQL Server is the answer.

All that said, any Access application that is distributed to others with shared data should be a split database design. Here are a few resources we've written:

• Splitting Microsoft Access Databases to Improve Performance and Simplify Maintainability
• Significantly Improve the Performance of Microsoft Access Databases with Linked Tables

We also offer a commercial product for enterprises, Total Access Startup, that helps with the distribution of databases to each user's desktop and launching the right version of Access.

A few weeks ago, I discussed how Microsoft Access could link to databases hosted on SQL Azure. Here's a new paper discussing How to Deploy Microsoft Access Databases Linked to a SQL Azure Database. Details on how this works and how to distribute your databases are covered. The people who receive your database don't need a license of SQL Server but do need to have its ODBC driver installed on their machines.

Here's the original blog on Microsoft Access, Azure and SQL Azure.

We at FMS are very excited about cloud computing and started developing solutions using Microsoft Azure including SQL Azure well before it was released to the general public. I feel cloud computing represents the next big platform change in the software industry and the most significant transformation since the introduction of the Internet in the mid-1990's. It will transform the internal hardware, application hosting, and data storage business the same way electric companies eliminated most organization's need to generate their own electricity.

While there's been lots of discussions of Azure with .NET and SQL Server, we also see lots of opportunities with Azure and the Microsoft Access/Excel/Office community. In fact, we're busily working on a way to integrate Access data and files with the cloud. Meanwhile, we'd like to share some tips and techniques for linking Access databases directly to tables in SQL Azure. This opens up huge new opportunities to create and deploy Access databases using a more robust, cheaper, and highly scalable platform that is enterprise quality.

 I look forward to your feedback on two new papers:

• Microsoft Azure and Cloud Computing...What it Means to Me and Information Workers
• Microsoft Access and Cloud Computing with SQL Azure Databases (Linking to SQL Server Tables in the Cloud).

On Monday July 19, I'll be live on the local radio show Start up or Shut up! which covers creating and running a small business.  It'll be from 2-3PM on 1580 AM in Northern Virginia. 

Start up or Shut up! is a LIVE radio show Monday afternoon from 2-3pm on the Big Talker 1580 AM hosted by Mark Bucher & Tom Gregg. More info about the program here About Startup or Shutup

The FMS Professional Solutions Group continues to create innovative software solutions that are making an impact on organizations and lives. Check out our updated consulting site to learn more about our solutions in action. See how we are making a difference from disaster relief in Haiti and Chile to the recent snowstorms in Washington DC. Here are some other highlighted solutions:

• Education
• Event Management
• Government
• Logistics Management
• Non-Profit Organizations
• Small Businesses

Let us bring this expertise to help you use data to make better decisions.

Total Visual SourceBook 2007, the most popular professional source code library for Microsoft Access, Office and Visual Basic 6 is shipping with an expanded code base and improved code manager. With 194 modules/classes and over 100,000 lines of code, Total Visual SourceBook lets you add our well written, documented, and tested code into your VBA/VB6 projects royalty-free. Includes full support for Access 2007, lots of new code for Outlook 2007, Office 2007, the web, etc. Learn more about Total Visual SourceBook and why so many developers use and learn from our years of experience creating professional quality solutions:

• New Features
• Overview and Screenshots
• Code Categories
• Complete List of Modules and Classes
• Sample Code (Example of Date/Time Calculations)

 

Professor Kathy Korman Frey at the George Washington University School of Business has kicked off the 2009-2010 HotMommas Case Study Competition. It is a unique project that takes the stories of the women and makes them teachable in a "case study" format, thus providing scalable, global access to role models and virtual mentors. You may recall us mentioning our work on this project not long ago.

If you want to nominate someone (yourself included) for the 2009-2010 competition, go to the HotMommas Facebook page or send an email with their information.

Links

The HotMommas Project

Nomination Form

Why Role Models Matter for Women and Girls

Hot Mommas Project Everyday Revolutionaties

Washington Post article

Here's another resource in our ongoing coverage of query techniques:

Learn how to create queries to find all the records in one table that don't have corresponding records in another table. If you're not familiar with the difference between INNER JOIN, OUTER JOIN, LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN, check out this new paper on these important query feature. It'll save you tons of time trying to code this yourself and will surely give you new ideas on how to better retrieve and analyze your data. The techniques apply to both Microsoft Access and SQL Server queries.

We are all used to seeing the 'rows and columns' metaphor when looking at data. In fact it is the primary interface for many of our data analysis tasks.

But rows and columns can hide valuable patterns. What happens when you take data out of a database and visualize it as a network? Now you can see important connections, centrality, trends, movement over time, and many other key indicators.

Check out our article on Link Analysis and Social Network Analysis to see how our Sentinel Visualizer solution provides innovative ways to get more meaning from your data.

While attempting to import an Access 2007 format database (*.ACCDB), you may receive an error such as: Unrecognized Database Format or Could not find installable ISAM. These errors can occur if you do not have the appropriate driver installed to import data from ACCDB files.

Importing Microsoft Access MDB databases into SQL Server is a built in feature of SQL Server. However, because of the difference between the database engine of Microsoft Access 2007 and earlier versions of Microsoft Access, it is not possible to connect to the Access 2007 database using the built-in data source “Microsoft Access”. You can use this if you wish toimport data from a MDB format, but not an ACCDB from Access 2007.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 offers the Import and Export Wizard to move data from one source to a destination. With the Import and Export wizard, you can access different types of data sources. These sources include other database formats such asMicrosoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, flat files, Microsoft Excel or Oracle database.