Database Experience

[Rick Harrison]

On Mar 23, 2004, at 2:16 AM, Bruce Robertson wrote:

>>> 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.

Bruce,

I stopped at version 4 because FileMaker started charging $1,000 for 
their
"Unlimited Version".  CDML in version 4 didn't support compound if 
statements,
one had to use nested if statements instead.  It also didn't support 
inline actions
so that one could perform multiple actions on the same database or 
different
databases - thus forcing users to buy "Lasso" to get those 
capabilities.  I don't
believe that it had it's own record locking scheme, one had to write 
their own
routines.  FileMaker at that time made no mention of such things in the
documentation.

No where did I proclaim myself to be a FileMaker Pro expert!  I was 
perhaps
expressing some of my frustration with the product and trying to find 
others
who were willing to disagree in a positive manner with some additional 
helpful
information.  FileMaker enthusiasts were certainly more than welcome to
add their experiences.
>>
>
> 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.

As I said before I stopped at version 4 so of course I wouldn't know 
about this.

>
> 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.
>

This is very useful information, thank you for sharing it with us.

What happened to the "Unlimited Version"?