mejohn

In my research project the records are observations of occurrences. By sorting the occurrences and especially saving the Sort, further analysis (statistical and graph) becomes less cumbersome and time consuming. Hence the need to save the sorted records. No printing necessary.

Sorting Millions of records takes many DAYS in FM 8 (if it does not crash while doing it) and many hours in FM 10. By placing FM 10 in RAMDisk 1.0 (2 GiB) a 75MB file will take at least 2 hours when sorted on 2 fields. (I am ever so happy I found RAMDisk for OS 10; compliments to the maker). Whatever I have tried - when saving the SORTED file - the sort order is gone when the file is reopened. The sort order reverted to RecordNumber order - which took quite some time, because before being able to Save, it appears FM first has to "un-do" the sort. I imagine the SAVE AS command is routed to the RECORDNUMBER Table to SAVE the Records in the - according to FM - "correct" order. Is there any way to get FM to SAVE AS SORTED: In other words am I doing something wrong. If so what? If it is not possible to accomplish what I want, would a NEW FEATURE solve the problem? New feature: SAVE AS SORTED - Either with limited any user input - user marking the option SAVE AS SORTED; - With EXTENDED user input by indicating the FIELD TO BE USED. (I have a field in which I have - after having performed my SORT - imported sequential numbers starting at 1, ending with the last record number in the file). Tried to Export the Records Sorted as tab delimited file - took several hours. But then ran into erratic FM behavior where not all records where imported (only 51MB out of 84MB) even though the procedure finished - without crashing, hanging or what have you - after some 10+ hours. My latest endeavor is to EXPORT the Records Sorted as a FileMaker File. It seems to work but is excruciatingly slow: only 10,000,000 records per hour for 8 fields per record. In total more than 85,000,000 records to export. Overheard: "You told me not to give up and look for the solution. I have done so diligently. But if you know it is out there, by now, I really would like to know where."

Latest MAC OS X version: FM 8 chose not to import more than 51,200,000 records out of a tab delimited file of 84,000,000 after more than 24 hours. It did this - amazingly - twice in a row. I have had other instances where it chose to import only 7,300,000 out of a tab delimited file of 48,000,000 records. NB: it did finish the import without crashing and proudly reported in a window: I have imported 51,200,000 records. I have given up on trying to import. It's too finicky and time consuming.