General Capacity question

[Dimwhit]

Not sure where to ask this, so I'll put it here.

By the time I'm done with my project, I'll have close to 1000 fields defined and a hundred or more value lists (with many value lists having up to several dozen entries).

Is that a lot? Am I creating an unwieldy database that will be prone to error, or is this small potatoes?

[Ender]

How many fields per table?

In a normalized solution, most tables will have 20-30 fields. Hub-tables with a big interface, might have over a hundred, but there's not too many of these.

If your 1000 fields are in the same table, that's definitely too many. FileMaker can handle it, but for maintenance and development its not good.

100 value lists might be reasonable for a large solution. Just try to reuse them when possible. You can also use conditional value lists as an alternative to large custom value lists. You can filter the values of successive conditional value lists based on the values of previous field entries (or global filters).

[Dimwhit]

Hmm. I've got all the fields in one table. I've never quite grasped the whole multi-table method, though I certainly need to.

Is it possible to take a group of fields and re-assign them to their own table?

[Ender]

During an Import, you can create a new table from the source fields. But before you go splitting things up, you need a good understanding of relational design.

I'd suggest reading up on relational design and normalization either in a book or on the web. The general principles are not FileMaker specific. Once you understand the idea of normalization, the trick then is applying it to tables (and table occurrences) in FileMaker.