I have created a FMPRO DB to run my business. I am self taught and have no formal training. Many of the scripts and approaches used to resolve my problems are not designed in a particularly savy manner. Additionally, I have nobody to consult with locally about issues that arise or may arise. I had one programming class in college - probably got a "C".

My database (FMPRO 6.0) currently has about 210,000 records and and 4,000 fields. The Database is almost entirely flat as I only recently figured out how to do relational DBs. There are many calcuation fields and quite a few scripts. The database works really well for me, but it is clearly not well designed. REPROGRAMMING THE DB IS SIMPLY OUT OF THE QUESTION.

My main reasons for considering the conversion are:

1) About 6 months ago I began scanning pdf docs into the DB which caused a strain on the 2 GB limit. I resolved this by setting up relational DBs and move the scans off the main DB regularly (my current DB is about 1.2 GB, but much of that is due to the PDFs). I think I can keep the size contained, but it requires some management.

2) I am starting to use the relational functions and don't want to have to go back and reprogram everything down the road. I may be mistaken, but it appears that my huge flat DB may actually be more suitable for conversion than one that was programmed by someone with superior skills - as the beta conversions appear to have gone relatively well. [The only noticeable problem is a number of my scripts generated a "Go to Field [ ]" line. Once this was removed, they seemed to work OK.

3) I am nervous that I am going to run into additional capacity issues.

As I have stated in a prior post, converting to FMPRO seems a bit like getting a vasectomy (kind of permanent), and at the moment it really ain't broke. That said, the program did lock up 2X this week and crashed once (although this is pretty unusual).

To convert or not?

Thanks,

Wes Everett

PS - I am located in Chapel Hill, NC

If "reprogramming... is out of the question," what kind of advice do you hope to get? Your best approach would be to fix the db is FileMaker 6 and then convert. I won't go into that if you're only going to ignore it. But at least consider this: you could probably use one tenth the number of fields if you used a proper relational structure, which would mean you'd not have to worry so much about file size. That said, I think FileMaker 7 would be unlikely to be a problem for you and you could make your files as big as you want (for all practical purposes).