Filemaker Connectivity Question

[William Mead]

Hi I hope I am posting this question in the right place.

I work for a small non-profit that has quite an extensive (and messy) FileMaker Pro database. They want to do things like have members manage their membership on line and stuff like that.

We have version 8 and the server software, but our Internet connection is too slow for any kind of hosting.

I was wondering if there is a good way or any ideas of putting some small amount of data on line in maybe a MySQL database (such as member number, member name, address info, and membership level), and have FM talk to that data, but keep the rest of it here (in related tables). Then other apps could talk to the data to do things like special member prices for subscriptions, etc.

Does this make sense? or does anyone have any good pointers as to how to find the right solution?

[Genx]

Hi William,

Well you could update the data using an ODBC connection... though how quickly this would run away from you i'm not sure.

The issue is anytime something is modified in FM you would have to trigger the sql statements... and you'd probably need to have audit scripts in place as well in case the odbc connection isn't working at any particular time... really a bit of a pain. But if all you need to put on line is a member's table, i suppose you could do it.