I have a client who has started developing and for reasons that may or may not be valid he has decided to use a basic user level filemaker 12 file linked to the main fmp data file as an external data source.

I can imagine some performance benefits but I am niot convinced and I wonder what implications this may have for fmp go

I have googled extensively and I can only find references to SQL files rather than fmp files.

Any input appreciated.

Not sure I understand exactly what you are asking.

 

I'm assuming that what your client has are just linked FM files, right?  Nothing wrong there, in fact for a lot of reasons it is good practice to split a solution into multiple files.

 

The FM Go users: are they just connecting or will they have a copy of the solution on their device?

 

What are your concerns?

The files are linked as external data sources rather the simple FMP linking.

The way fmp treats record locking and indexing is different for external files, does this have implications

FileMaker only has one place to link files and it is called "external data sources".  The default is a FileMaker source, the other option is an ODBC source (ESS).

So the fact that the linked files show up under "external data source" is normal.  But are you saying he is using an ODBC connection to the other files?