I must say I was reallly looking forward to this feature, but I overlooked one thing--- that you have to install and configure the ODBC driver on every single machine that is going to access the data source. I guess I was hoping this would be handled by the server OR perhaps by the FileMaker 9 client without a need for tinkering with the ODBC driver.

I've already accessed data sources using version 8... and it's just such a pain to have to configure the drivers on the client machines.. I wish the FileMaker client would get thinner, not thicker.

still a great feature and a definite improvement over how you could work with ODBC data sources in version 8.

one question I still have is: Is there a directory somewhere of all the publicly available data sources that are availabe "out there", for free or a fee ?? It's great to have this new feature, but I'd love to start kicking the wheels with it by sending it out on the web to do some really cool, useful, immediate work.

One data source I was hoping would be ODBC was PubMed (scientific journals), but they seem to provide XML feeds. FileMaker 9 can't work with XML feeds can it ? (in a way similar to ODBC data sources, I mean) ?

IIRC, I believe you can set the DSN on your FileMaker Server and have the drivers work from there for all the guests. Check the documentation.

Steven

I'll check and report back if I find out.. if anyone else knows, please chime in thanks Steven

Steven is absolutely correct.

1: set up the DSN on the server (with requisite drivers)

2: Deploy a database that has tables from the SQL Datasource.

3: Open the database on client.

The table will work as expected. The driver is on server, and server handles all the SQL integration.

Note that on Mac OS X, in this configuration, you'll need to get the Actual Technologies driver that supports enough connections for your purposes. The basic ($30) driver only supports 5 connections -- ie: 5 simultaneous users.