I have converted 14 relational databases to FM7. I went through the conversion with few frustrations but now... To open these databases in FM7 it is really slow. Does anyone else have this problem or a solution to make the initial opening of the data base more efficient?

Check out the define...file references for each of the converted files. If you have alot of bogus file references left over, this will slow things down alot.

Also, you may want to cosider rebuilding some of the files by having some files that contain multiple tables. This can simplify things like accounts and privileges etc.

Dana

Let me clarify this a little more...but I agree that Dana is on the right track.

After conversion, none of the file references are bogus per se. Each one is doing something in your file. Where the "bogus" part comes in is that some of them are probably pointing to locations where file XYZ used to reside but no longer does. The delay you are probably seeing is FileMaker having to resolve all these file references to see if the file is there or not. If you have a lot of these, it could take some time...especially if you have networked ones that use the "*" or wildcard character.

There are some tools that you can use to aid in managing File References. Many have been discussed on this forum (MetaDataMagic, etc.)

One thing you can do in the short term is modify ALL your file references to just point to a relative path. In other words if you have a file reference that looks like this...

FTR.FP7 3 =

file:/F:/bin/FTR

fmnet:/*/FTR

file:FTR

Could be edited down to just...

FTR.FP7 3 =

file:FTR

IF ALL your files reside in the same folder after conversion then this technique will work great. But under no circumstances should you just start deleting file references because it "looks" like you don't need them anymore. That is a quick ticket to getting a bunch of "file not found" errors when running scripts, opening files, etc.

Cleaning up your file references like above should go a long way toward speeding up your application.