Reference Tables across Solutions

[webko]

Not quite sure if this is the best board - Lee, feel free to move if you can think of a better place.

We've got several FileMaker solutions within our organisation, all at different levels of maturity, and generally each running on their own server (we've got three production servers)

There are a number of reference tables that are replicated in each of them - let's use a list of Countries as the example, which is simply the ISO Country list of 250-ish countries with their 2 letter code and their name.

So, this information exists in multiple places, and is (accordingly) more or less accurate, depending on when/if the list gets updated.

What do people think is the best approach to synchronising this information? And pros/cons...

- Single central Reference file - one source of data, but all scripts / references / field definitions in the solutions will need to checked / rewritten

- Pick one as the 'golden' master, leave the others in place and write some auto-update scripts

Other ideas?

[Kris M]

If development was a Democracy i'd cast my vote for the single reference table/file.

A single authoritative sources for data is the backbone of data integrity.

I'd bit the bullet and refactor because, in the long run, maintenance of one data source across a system is way easier than trying to program around data consistency issues.

Edited February 19, 2016 by Kris M