Does Lasso help with Filemaker queueing problems?

[vermeerp]

I had planned to use Filemaker Pro Unlimited and JDBC to have my 100 or so users interact with the Filemaker databases. I've been finding that the databases quit responding if more than one use hits the databases at about the same time. I called Filemaker Tech Support and was told that Filemaker doesn't handle queueing of requests well, and that this was a "known problem". We used to use FMPro 4.1 and lasso on a Mac and did not have these problems, but I inherited that system and really don't understand what Lasso is contributing here. Would putting Lasso in between my Java code and the Filemaker databases "cure" my problems? Does Lasso help regulate the requests to FMPro?

Appreciate any help and pointers to where I might get more information.

Pam

[Kurt Knippel]

What is the intent here?

Are you web-enabling your databases or are you trying to get out of paying for Filemaker Server and licenses of Filemaker Pro client?

If the former, what do you mean by "the databases quit responding if more than one use hits the databases at about the same time"?

If the later, you will spend more money in development and lost productivity than it will cost for Filemaker Server and the site license for Filemaker Pro.

[Anatoli]

RE: I had planned to use Filemaker Pro Unlimited and JDBC to have my 100 or so users interact with the Filemaker databases. I've been finding that the databases quit responding if more than one use hits the databases at about the same time.

*************

I do not know the JDBC mechanism, but for sure it works fine in standard Web Companion and CDML, no problem.

On heavy test (search the forum) our server was serving more than average queries at rate 9 transactions per second of CPU -- lousy Celeron 1.2Ghz 256k cache, 133FSB and ATA 100 7200RPM disks.

I guess today's P-4 2.8GHz, 533FSB, 512k cache and Ultra SCSI 160 with 15000 RPM drive will yield easily 30 of such transactions.

[vermeerp]

We are not at all trying to get out of buying Filemaker Server. We have a Java program, and were told that the connection to Filemaker through JDBC is a web connection, and that therefore we needed to have Filemaker Unlimited, which allows unlimited numbers of IP addresses to access the data through the Web Companion. We knew the Filemaker was single threaded, but thought it could handle queueing up requests if it was handling one request when another came through.

What happens instead is that if more than one user is trying to access the databases through the Java program, it just quits responding. It's like the Web Companion just stops working. I can still see the databases through my client on my computer, and they look fine when I look at the actual server. But I have to close Filemaker and restart the databases before it will start responding to request from JDBC in the Java program.

I also posted a question similar to this on the Filemaker Pro Unlimited board, and on the ODBC/JDBC board, trying to see if someone had another solution to the problem, but my posts on those two boards seem to have disappeared.

[Kurt Knippel]

FM Forums only allows posting of messages to a single forum. We will delete extra messages. Just remember to keep them in the most appropriate forum only.

[Anatoli]

I am very skeptical of JDBC in FM.

I guess is one of those "marketing" features -- nice on spec sheet, not really up to a job, like ODBC.

[Kurt Knippel]

I think that one of the issues as well is that JDBC from Filemaker into some kind of SQL data source is good, but JDBC into Filemaker is not that good. Filemaker is not really designed as a SQL datab source, and this may be the problem.

[Keith M. Davie]

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, you were using FMPro 4.1

Now, "We ... were told that ... we needed to have Filemaker Unlimited"

Umm. Which version of Unlimited did you get and is it the host, or is it serving through FMP server?

I'm not really very knowledgeable about JDBC, but I bet those who are might benefit from knowing in which version of FMPro you now are working.

[falkaholic]

Most stuff about FileMaker is "marketing" but for what its worth, I fiddled with JDBC, FM, on a Resin web/jsp server. Work fine, tho I was the only user.

[vermeerp]

We are now using FMPro 5.5v2. As far as I can tell, we have installed all patches. This was the top Filemaker product available 2 or 3 months ago when we purchased it. We wanted to upgrade to 5 (or higher) because we wanted to be able to use JDBC to talk to the databases. We are planning to switch to a more appropriate database for our project, because from all I can tell, Filemaker and JDBC are not a good match at all. But we didn't want to change everything at once, so had thought we could first change the program to use JDBC communication to Filemaker (instead of Lasso and Blueworld's Java classes), then change the underlying database. We are now looking to change database systems a whole lot faster than we had originally intended.

[vermeerp]

Also, Unlimited is our host product. We have one server (new, dual-processor, Windows 2000 Server OS) to run the databases from, and we are not opposed to also getting Filemaker Server if that can solve our problem. But at this point it feels like throwing good money after bad, since it is not clear that would help matters. Especially since we can't get another computer to run Server on one and Unlimited on another, which was suggested in some of the Filemaker Unlimited configuration documents.

[Anatoli]

Again -- read my replies.

FileMaker is great. WebCompanion is Great. CDML is easy and powerful. The performance is excellent. We are running 5 solutions for 5 clients from single Unlimited. We didn't restart the Unlimited for months.

Unlimited is running on single NT box with IIS, WebConnector, Security Filter and two Mercury mail servers powered with Celeron 1.2 GHz and 7200 RPM disk.

Just don't try something what isn't working at full speed.

[Keith M. Davie]

I'm with Anatoli here. FileMaker works very nicely as a browser solution with cdml. I'm serving my site with 4.0 and it seems to be working fine (except for power outages and the like)

I am not enthralled with either jdbc or odbc. I see them as being "in the way" in terms of web connectivity whereas cdml to my view is more in the solution of web connectivity.

As to multi-threaded, yes, FMU5.5 is supposed to be; however ScriptMaker is still single-threaded. If jdbc is what I understand it to be, then it is not much different than from a peer-to-peer solution and suffers (imo) from record locking, with the added feature of the single-threaded ScriptMaker. Since you are hosting the file on FMU, you may well be experiencing a problem related to record locking or something like that. But this is just a guess based on my biases.

Like Anatoli says, "CDML is easy and powerful."

[Kurt Knippel]

As much as I love Filemaker, it is sounding more and more like it is not the product for you. You are not really using anything that is "FileMaker" and there are many better products for pure and simple SQL database serving via JDBC. I'd recommed staying away from SQL Server (for far too many reasons to go into here), but MySQL is a ******* fine product and should work great with your Java solution.

[vermeerp]

Thanks, everyone, for your thoughts on this thread. We are in fact moving to mySQL as a long term solution. Filemaker was the "perfect" solution when the person I work with originated this project many years ago, without any plan to integrate the databases with a Java program. I guess our application has just grown in a different direction than Filemaker.

For the short term, I'm going to try replacing the JDBC part of the code with the Java classes FM provides that use CDML to actually process the requests. This will help us answer the question of whether it is our server setup that is the problem, or whether it is the JDBC driver that is the problem.

Again, thanks for your time.