We am currently using FM4 and I am studying the possibility to upgrade to FM5 or possibly to another db.We are direct mail company and do marketing in hundereds of countries around the world. We are dividing our records by country making one file for each country with 100.000+ records in each file. We would like to know the pros and cons of upgrading to FM5 vs. another db as well as the performance limitatations of FM5.

For max performance use Oracle or something from the B-I-G end of town. You'll also need a full-time DB Adminstrator, maintenence contracts, etc.

Or you could use FileMaker Pro or Access and take the performance hit, but not need to employ a whole IT department to keep the thing running.

Your choice.

There are some feature differences from FM 4.1 to FM 5.0, but no real speed improvements. Most of the capacity increases are on the server side going from FM Server 3.0 to FM Server 5.0. Open files increase to 125 and number of guests increases to 250. So much of the performance issue depends upon what you are doing with the records in the database. I've used FM files with 2 million records and had adequate performance. Don't try to sort on an unindexed field, but performance for many operations is just fine. -bd

[This message has been edited by LiveOak (edited November 23, 2000).]

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Originally posted by LiveOak:

There are some feature differences from FM 4.1 to FM 5.0, but no real speed improvements.

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All my installations reported increase of speed from 30 - 300%.

Just opening files on server, wow, that is much faster. And opening them from Client also.

I might believe the 30% increase when considering server performance using TCP/IP. In Mac installtions with 48-49 files on FM Server 3.0 moving to FM Server 5.0, we have not seen the 300% sort of numbers (even going to RAM disk operation doesn't seem to give this kind of improvement). Perhaps the PC side gives these kind of numbers. -bd

To open 17 databases v 4 on Pentium 300Mhz takes 45 sec.

The same with FM 5 is only 10 sec.

You are right, on TCP/IP is everything also faster.

300% increase is in WebCompanium v 5. One complicated HTML page was processed in 17 sec in v.4. Now it is 3 sec at max in version 5.

Anatoli

quote:

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Originally posted by LiveOak:

I might believe the 30% increase when considering server performance using TCP/IP. In Mac installtions with 48-49 files on FM Server 3.0 moving to FM Server 5.0, we have not seen the 300% sort of numbers (even going to RAM disk operation doesn't seem to give this kind of improvement). Perhaps the PC side gives these kind of numbers. -bd

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