I'm in the process of instituting a filemaker database to be accessed over the web, initially using web companion, then probably will integrate Lasso.

What I want to know is how much 'pressure' can a filemaker database take over the web. In terms of how many users hitting it before it begins to give problems? And what problems will then be encountered? Thanks much for your helpful replies.

There are a lot of variables that determine the speed over the web...number of simultaneous users; speed of the server; number of portals, indexed fields, lookups, different layouts, and calculations; your internet connection speed; and finally, how many records are in the database. It's very hard to give an accurate measurement without having more specific information. A database with few users and many records may be the same speed as a database with many users and few records, etc. From my personal experience, I've found that you should figure that the database will function about half the speed over the web as it would working from directly within FileMaker (with the same number of users, of course). I know this is all a little vague, but it's difficult to be anything but...Hope this helps.

Jeff

It's probably fair to say that if you were to design a database-backed web site like Amazon -- something big and popular, something serious -- the solution wouldn't be FileMaker Pro. You'd be hanging around the B-I-G end of town with Oracle and other RDBMS.

You'd also be having to hire a team of db and server admin people too, net ops, as well as lawyers and accountants to manage the maintenance contracts, plus the finacial team to float company on the stock market so you can pay for it all...