ISO FileMaker Magazine

When your average knowledge worker starts developing with FileMaker Pro, there’s a lot of background and history which may be missing. Especially, when it comes to making certain decisions about schema. We’ve all been at that level at some point in the learning curve, and the process of reworking things is just par for the course.

The FileMaker environment makes it so easy to simply add a new calculated value. It’s even part of our mental processing. “Oh, I need to calculate this.”

The problem, however, with FileMaker’s simplicity can be its detriment to performance. It’s far too easy to sprinkle in unstored calculations all throughout your database systems.

In other database environments, the notion of an integrated calculation doesn’t even exist. The database is simply the storage part of the whole equation and may not offer much logic at all. You might have stored procedures, but these aren’t part and parcel with the whole environment like they are within FileMaker.

In this video, I go over some of the tools and tricks I use in order to evaluate the performance level of any given database. Using this knowledge helps you to create more efficient systems which will perform better as time goes by. Remember the saying “Less is more.”? It may benefit your database when it comes to fields and layouts.