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Tuesday 31 August 2004, 7:25 PM
Fantastic although it takes a while to grasp its powers
I've been using databases on and off for 20 years -- even wrote a database manager a while back. FileMaker Pro is great. It's easy, as far as sophisticated database managers go. And once you learn the somewhat peculiar way FileMaker does things, you can be amazingly productive in a relatively short time (2-3 weeks).
A very cool feature is the ability to instantly serve your database over the Web , which means that you can have multiple people in the office with essentially the same interface as if they had the software on their desks, without having to install separate copies of the software everywhere. This makes it easy to have multiple people updating the data too, regardless of whether they're on Macs or PCs.
There are problems -- for example, the fonts don't display well in Preview mode (essential!). There are a lot of very beautiful and sophisticated templates that come with the software, but to actually make some data entry screens and reports look great takes a large amount of fiddling at the pixel by pixel level (it'd be nice if it was much more automatic). There are things that should work much better (it should be obvious that a mismatched join using different data types is an error, rather than having to spend countless hours tracking down what the problem is (the first time). It's too difficult to import report layouts, which means you have to exclusively lock the database rather than just being able to work on it remotely, send in the new changes to the front office, etc.
Some other problems are that the script language is basically a way to control the interface rather than a 'real' language. But the truth is a 'real' language eventually becomes a big pain to deal with, and these scripts don't become that complex and you never have to remember arcane syntax.
However, I would kill for the ability to just be able to use a "SELECT" statement... which you can't do.
Overall, though, it's a fantastic piece of software.
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