I am accessing SQL data via an ODBC link and I am finding that performing finds is incredibly slow. Has anyone else experienced this and if so found a solution to speed it up. My long term aim is to use Filemaker 9 as a frontend to work with multiple SQL data sources. Am I expecting to much from Filemaker??

FileMaker's did not intend for users to user it as a Front End into external sources. They make it pretty clear that it should not be used strictly as a front end.

We have found that some External sources seem to be faster than others. BTW try asking your SQL person to index some of their fields.

Thanks for the reply! I'll try the indexing but I'm not holding out that that will be the fix as other people have given me the same answer. Do you know of any other solution that would be better? I have looked at one called Servoy which is similiar to Filemaker in the design side, the only thing is I'll have to learn a new application.

FileMaker does a 'contains' find by default. I've found that it can make a big difference if you're looking up ID's or in my case ISBN's if you preceed your find criteria with "==" (no quotes). This forces an exact match search, and was much faster.

Find is performed on the CLIENT, so the whole record set is downloaded and processed every time.

(as I currently understand it)