Hi All -

I have a question....

Does anyone know for sure if there is a performance benefit to performing a find on local fields and then using the Constrain request to find data in a related field?

When it does the find on the related field in the Constrain request, does it only search through the found set of records from the first request or does it still need to search through all the records in the table?

Although I don't have evidence of improved speed in FM8 for constraining a Find for the related/unstored calc criteria, Fenton seems to indicate it here:

http://fmforums.com/forum/showpost.php?post/216612/

In FM7 and later, Finds on indexed related fields are not much slower than Finds on indexed fields in the same table. However, Finds on unstored calcs can be a problem whether they are local or not, depending on what's involved in the calc, whether you're hosting with Server or not, and the particular versions of FileMaker Pro client and Server.

If your client software is updated to 8v3 or later and you're using Server 8v3 or later, then there shouldn't be too many issues. In most cases, Server takes the criteria and performs the Find on the Server, then sends the results to the client. The one case that could still be a problem is when the relationship is based on an unstored calc or the Find is on an unstored calc, where the calc involved uses certain Get() functions that can only be evaluated on the client side. In this case the information about each record and their related records are sent to the client to see if they fit with the specified criteria.