Filemaker through ODBC

[Ben Rubinstein]

Mark Schonewille <m.schonewille at ...> writes:

> I might start a project that should connect a Revolution front-end to  
> a FM Pro database. One of the candidates to do this is ODBC. Reading  
> the archives, I can't help thinking that the combination of ODBC and  
> FM Pro may not be the best option. Does anyone have good experiences  
> with ODBC and FM Pro? How easy or difficult is it to accomplish this?

Hi Mark,

We have several installations that routinely extract data from FMP via ODBC.  It
works fine, with a few minor limitations (which may by now have been dealt with
anyway, these were set up a few years ago).  The app itself routinely extracts
data from various different databases, so the good thing about FMP via ODBC, as
far as I'm concerned, is that configuring the app in these cases to extract from
FMP was reasonably trivial.  It is necessary to throw a dialog on screen to tell
the user to make sure that Filemaker is open and has these databases open.

However, one caveat:  for the last 18 months, we've been having horrendous
problems with one client using this facility.  Their database solution, built
for them in FMP by a third party developer, is the most insanely architected
I've seen in a long while.  Apart from a shudder of disgust, I didn't think it
would be a problem; but in fact, especially as the client has added considerably
more data, we've found this impacts on getting the data out over ODBC.  In some
cases it times out; even worse, in some cases it doesn't, but doesn't return all
the data.

I mostly blame the madmen who so badly designed the database solution; but the
fact is that it 'works' viewed through FileMaker itself, but fails in various
ways over ODBC.

So just be aware, that while I don't think you should have a problem, if you
were to try to connect to an exceptionally badly designed database (eg one in
which extracting simple items of data required FileMaker to undertake chains of
calculations) you might run into difficulties.


- Ben