Best way to store tables?

[mnm]

Whats the best way of storing tables in FMP 7.0? I know you can now create one file which contains all the database tables for the solution as opposed to creating a separate file for each table. So which is the best for a case where I have:

one table with 200+K records (yearly increase of about 300-700 records)

three tables with 20K records ( yearly increase of about 20k-30k records each)

one tables with 8k records ( yearly increase of about 8-10k records)

There are other tables with less data and a lower yearly increase, but all the same they are currently in one file. I know they said that FMP7 can hold terabytes of information, but how does it perform? I'm at the beginning stages of development and don't want to find myself up a creek without a paddle once this thing goes live. Any suggestions?

[Fitch]

You should strongly consider keeping the data in separate files, and using another file with all your relationships and scripts and UI as the front end. That way you can easily do upgrades by just dropping in a new UI file.

[mnm]

Thanks Fitch.

One more question. Seeing that my tables will grow so much from year to year, should I break the tables out into separate files or even group related tables into separate files.

For instance, I try to make all my value lists from tables. Should I create one table that holds all my value lists and then create separate files for other data?

The thing I'm dreading is file corruption. With all that data in one file it would take some time for the file to be recovered.

[Fitch]

According to FileMaker, version 7 is virtually immune to corruption. That said:

I would still tend to keep large tables as separate files if only to make backups or other copying operations more manageable.

I like the idea of grouping related tables into one file if only to make security more manageable.

I would probably put value list tables in with the UI file, but you might want to keep a separate utility file or something. Imagine - now each one of your value lists can have its own table, with each value its own record. Wow.