Database Experience

[Bruce Robertson]

>> And you do?
> 
> I don't think you have to be insulting if you want to disagree, or you
> have anything positive to add.  Why do you think people are starting
> to not ask their important questions on this list?  Its a bad trend.

Is it a better trend to not understand a product or technology and yet claim
that it is inadequate? You didn't ask a question. You made a proclmation.
You stated that Filemaker can't do something that has been a prominent part
of their advertised feature set for several years.

> Many people have been trying to move away from FileMaker Pro to MySQL
> because of these issues and multi-threaded issues.  A decent database
> should handle these things without the programmer having to re-invent
> with his/her own schemes.

Various hand-crafted MySQL record locking schemes are discussed in most
MySQL books.

>> If you want to build a custom record locking
>> solution for web transactions, you can do it and you will face the same
>> issues in any  system. It only takes a very simple calculation in edit
>> privileges to accomplish.
> 
> Would you like to be more specific and helpful?  What version of
> FileMaker Pro are you referring to?

Record-level create, edit, browse, and delete features were introduced with
Filemaker 5.5. I believe that was in 2001. These features are controlled by
a calculation; and that calculation can be pretty much anything you want.

> I'm not using the latest version.
> FileMaker Pro needs to convince me with some major web improvements
> that it is worth the price to upgrade.  So far I'm unconvinced.
> If you have experience with version 7 I'd be interested in hearing
> about it.

Filemaker 7 is an approximately equivalent technical change to the switch
from MacOS 9 to OS X. This a massive technology change, and even people who
participated in the beta program have concluded that will probably take a
year before anybody fully understands all the power we've been given. I'm
pretty good with Filemaker, and I participate in several of the Filemaker
forums, and even the most highly skilled people are saying holy ****, what
have we got here!

High performance multithreaded server. 8TB max file size. 2GB  max content
in a single text field of a single record. BLOB support. ODBC/JDBC SQL
add/drop/create etc support. Multiple tables per file - max 1 million, as a
matter of fact. Industrial strength security. Robust instant web publishing.
Much improved relational model including multiple field pairs and different
types of join operators: equal, not equal, GT, LT, etc. $150 updgrade from
any previous version. Data/interface separation if you want to build that
way. It is still a product clearly in the FileMaker line and of course some
people will find things they don't like and will still elect to use other
products. But it's a whole new ball game, and I don't think anybody really
understands the implications yet.