JohnCx

No, I don't and if I did you would have been able to quote me on it so stop pullings things out of the air. At no point in time have I classified FM as an "enterprise" class DBMS. You have no idea what you are referring to when you ask the question about Oracle its featureset or the cost to hire an Oracle certified DBA with over five years of experience, but when you do you sure can come talk to me about it. Why don't you do some investigating yourself before you decide to write what you write?? First, you make a blatant assumption that no large scale businesses trust their data with FileMaker and you are proven wrong. Second, and again without any research you pull the, "(especially if you think DBA's are expensive)" out of your you know what without once again doing any background work. Here are some average salary figures for an Oracle DBA in some populous cities within the US if you are an Oracle Certified DBA: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Certification=Oracle_Certified_Professional_(OCP)_DBA/Salary I have read over a lot of your posts here on this forum. You're a very savvy young man when it comes to using FileMaker, but please stop assuming you know what in the hell you are talking about as it pertains to all things business! And, if you are going to make these assumptions that you do please do a little bit of research before you dole out something to be a fact. Also, don't quote me on things I have not said. Thank you. :

1.) United Airlines is using FileMaker in their maintenance and engineering. 2.) There are a lot of companies I think you haven't even bothered to read about that are using FM in some form or the other and are a heck of a lot bigger than FedEX. 3.) No offense, but I don't think you have come to the point in your life yet or in business where you actually know what's expensive and what isn't when you make comments like these. When you start working with getting an Oracle system with a grid backbone online, plus hiring DBA(s) to maintain it then you can start to talk about what's pricey. The examples you are giving are trying to go beyond what you would be using FileMaker for so forgive me for saying they don't make much sense at all. FileMaker in large corporations is based upon departmental need more often than not. This 250 figure you keep pulling out is meaningless. That's concurrent use... yeah I guess it would mean something if the server couldn't drop idle connections, but I have personally been in situations before where the install-base was upwards of 500 and very rarely were there complaints about being locked out because connections limits had been reached. But, once again what you are saying by bringing up the example of an airline's booking system doesn't make much sense anyway because FM wasn't designed to meet that kind of a data-load to begin with! Your legislative arguments make no sense at all to me. As far as law is concerned around most of the globe it's how the data is stored and maintained not the amount of data that is stored to begin with. If you're running with Oracle and you create a FUBAR situation where you have pertinent data loss you're in just as much trouble as if you were with FileMaker. Your 500 * for maintenance makes very little sense. If you have that big of an install-base you sign a stinking support contract for a set fee or you don't belong in business to begin with! All of this financial stuff you are talking about is nonsense, sorry man. You must not really have much of a clue as what goes into judging the cost effectiveness for technical expidentures - it involves a lot more planning than how many people will be using a given system. Sorry if I sound harsh, but I really am totally baffled by some of your comments......

Wow, are you not aware of the very, very large organizations that use FM for certain needs on a daily basis? Don't make it seem like the product never leaves the shores of medium-sized and small business to venture off into the mega corporate world my friend because you would be very mistaken.

What you are saying is not the feeling of every corporation who has FileMaker present in their install-base or is thinking about adding it, sorry. You cannot look at a massive multi-national who may be considering FileMaker for lets say a specific function of their human resources department and doesn't need Joe, Sally, Peter and the other 500 people in their department to have access to creating reports and layouts. Please don't tell me, "Oh well eat the cost of the full license at the volume discount and lock them out privilege wise." That's a technical response not an efficient/cost effective business response. If the number of licenses dictates you're going to be paying $50.00 a client for a full copy of 9 then it would mean you would be paying even less if there was a thin client... would it not? A thin client is absolutely nothing more than a networkable runtime that isn't free and produced with a copy of Advanced. There is absolutely more than enough demand for such a thin client especially now that FileMaker is an easy in to SQL data-sources. Just off the shelf without a volume discount it's worth $100.00 just to have a thin client option to connect your clients, staff etc to that MySQL data in a beautified way and if they would get their act together they could make a fortune lol! Putting together a MySQL database is the easy part. Coding the whole front-end in a desktop technology like C# or a web-based technology like PHP is where the time and effort come into play and FileMaker could take a big chunk out of that market.

This is my first post here and I am not trying to start a war, but what you are saying makes very little sense for a 2007-2008 world. 1.) Why wasn't there at least a thin client when version 7 rolled out? Since version six what we have been lead to believe is they are focused much more-so on inter-office workgroups than they are the small development company. You cannot possibly tell me that if they were to release a thin client even in the price range of $100.00 a pop that there would not be a huge demand for it from corporate environments. I personally know of a rather small organization (in the scope of what is large and small) that would purchase 250 licenses for a thin client in a heart-beat. To me not having a thin-client now that we are at version nine boils down to them being just a bit greedy on what they expect from business consumers and corporations. They do not now, or have they ever had an efficient pricing model for their so-called target base, which is inter-office corporate. 2.) When I was a whole heck of a lot younger I was with a company that developed FileMaker solutions for transmission shops back then the price to get in with the solution itself was 3-6k not counting the required FileMaker licenses. Eventually this company was bought out by AAMCO and now their shops are paying even more of a premium to use the latest version of this solution under the umbrella of one of the largest national transmission shops in the United States. To get to my point (and still being very close with my former boss now department head over there) they would gladly pay FileMaker 100k to get a networkable runtime (which is nothing more than a thin client...) for 1,000 seats. So, from the perspective of being your small time developer - no they would never make any money, but any huge corporate environment that was considering the system... come on now! Sorry, I hate to say it because I love FileMaker and I love Apple, but even though they govern themselves they still have the Jobs pricing syndrome, which is a very high premium for a nice package - but not much room to move at all if you want a cheaper model. (It doesn't exit) In today's day and age you cannot be the BMW of the RDBMS world and continue to grow because the free alternatives out there are not like they were with a 1998 pricing model. Will it effect them today, no. Will it effect them tomorrow? I believe so. All thats from someone who has been using the software for over a decade and continues to develop in it every day!