FileMaker Fundamentals: Understanding Indexing

by Matt Petrowsky

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Anyone CAN find a needle in a haystack, if they supply a seemingly endless amount of time and patience. The problem, however, is we often feel we have little of either.

So we strive to make things as fast as we can - including our database response time. This is where field indexing enters the picture. Fields in your database are indexed according to various rules. Different field types are indexed slightly differently, but it's all zeros and ones underneath.

For the most part, indexing in FileMaker is easy. FileMaker attempts to take care of this for you. It has a check box which is turned on by default, which basically implies "Don't worry, I'll just turn it on if I need it."

So, it's always good to know what is going on behind the scenes and what might bite you in the behind. Such as an accidental indexing set off across millions of record rows while a database is live.

In this particular video, I show you everything I know about how FileMaker indexing works and why you need to know about it. While disk space may be cheap, and making every possible field indexed is certainly possible, there's always a trade off. For example, if your file size is double of what it needs to be, then backing it up will obviously take a longer time.

So, taking control of the indexing is something any proficient FileMaker developer will do.