How do you like FMSA 8?

[Matt Singerman]

Hi everyone,

My boss and I have been discussing the future of our FileMaker databases, and whether it would be worthwhile to upgrade. First, a little background. We are running FileMaker Server 5.5 on a machine running OS X 10.2.8. It interfaces with our web server, which is running WebSTAR on a 10.2.8 machine, via Lasso Pro 5. This, as I am sure you know, involves using a "web companion" machine running FileMaker Pro 5.5. This is on a machine running Windows XP.

While this does work, the technology is very out of date, and the web companion is prone to problems, with FMP hanging up on a semi-regular basis. Plus, the hardware these machines are on is all older, and is beginning to show its age.

We are considering purchasing new hardware and upgrading to Lasso 8.5, FMSA 8, and OS X Server 10.4 (or 10.5, depending on what is available when) using the built-in Apache server as the web server (I know that OS X Server isn't required for this, but the enhanced management interface is worth it for our needs). We also understand that there would be a fair amount of rewriting Lasso code, but we are prepared for that. I just had a few questions for people who have used FM 8:

(1) How difficult will it be to migrate our existing databases from FMS 5.5 to FMSA 8? We have a couple of gigabytes of data comprising hundreds of thousands of records, and a smooth database transition is absolutely necessary. Are there tools available (included with FileMaker or otherwise) that ease this process?

(2) How do people feel about FMSA 8? I have read positive things about it, but haven't been able to find a full-on review of it. Is web content management a whole lot easier without using the web companion server? I would imagine so, since it seems to remove a whole layer of complexity, but I obviously don't know for sure.

Thanks for any and all info, folks!

[xochi]

My thoughts, some of which are relevant to your situation, some not.

1. Regarding the conversion: Converting from FM5/6 to FM8 generally seems to be done in one of two ways: One: just drag & drop all the files on to FM8, then spend some time cleaning up file references and fixing some scripts (e.g. adding Commit Record scripts when appropriate). The other way is to do a complete rewrite in FM8 and then import the data from your FM5 / 6 files, and rewrite your scripts from the ground up. In my case, I had a big multi-file multi-megabyte FM5 database, that had a not very good pedigree it had been designed in a hurry by multiple authors and was rather a mess. After some initial testing, I decided that the complex mess of scripts & tables & file references & relationships was too tangled to allow the simple conversion. Decided full rewrite was the much better way to go, and I ended up choosing to do it as a multiple table / single file system. Rewriting is a big job, not for the faint of heart. However, the benefits are many -- you can clean up the relational design, get rid of many calculated fields (e.g. multi-key relationships), and the end result can be a much smaller database with less redundancy.

2. FMSA8 -- is a MUCH better server than FMS5.5. After some initial bugs with 8.0v1 and 8.0v2, I'm finding 8.0v3 to be rock solid stable, and much much faster for most operations. In FMS8 many calculations are done server-side, and things often are 10x faster than in FMS5.5 FMS does better caching and you can set a giant cache (e.g. a gigabyte or higher if you have the RAM). The only real slowdowns I've noticed are in importing and deleting records, where for some reason FMS8 is quite slow compared to FMS5.5. I suspect this is because it's doing more work to maintain relational integrity? But bottom line, unless your solution spends most of its time importing or deleting data, you will end up with a system that is overall much, much faster.

3. Apache is great, and there is are a ton of support systems out there for customizing it. It's also complex, but I'm sure you know that.

4. Mac Intel -- I've not tried it personally yet, but FM's claims that server 8.0v4 is 3-4x faster than on the PPC chips appear to be true in many cases based on reports on these forums.

5. Live development -- if you do your development on a live hosted solution, FM8 is much better than 5. There are many cases (such as re-doing a calc field) where a developer change in server 5 would effectively halt the server. FM8 seems to handle these kinds of changes more transaprently.

6. PHP/Lasso -- I have no direct experience. I used to do CDML in 5.5, and now I'm using IWP in FM8. IWP has some serious limitations, but in some situations it's quite amazing how well it translates a FM layout to the web.

In conclusion, I think that if you can afford the downtime to do a fairly difficult full rewrite in FM8, you will reap the benefits down the road. You might want to consider various compromises, such as keeping the old system hosted and operating on FM5 while you develop the brand new system on FM8, and then at some point plan a large chunk of downtime where you import all the data into the new FM8 system and shut down the old one.

Hope this is helpful!