Chapter 3. Specifications and Storage Limits

Whenever you work with a piece of software, it’s a good idea to be aware of the software’s limits, both practical and theoretical. Important design considerations can hinge on a correct appraisal of the capabilities of your tools. For example, if you need to build a system that can correctly work with dates prior to those in the AD era (anno Domini: from the year 1 forward), it’s a good idea to be aware of the storage capabilities of the date field type in FileMaker Pro.

Knowing Your Limits

Some of these limits are more theoretical than practical, and you’re better off observing the practical limits. We don’t recommend you build systems with a million tables, for example, or write calculations containing 30K of text characters. If you feel you need to push these upper limits, you might want to recheck your assumptions and, if necessary, rethink your approach.

Table 3.1 provides the limits of some of the most important measurable capacities of the FileMaker product line.

Table 3.1. FileMaker Specifications

External SQL Sources (ESS) Specifications

The FileMaker 12 product line has the capability to integrate data tables from external SQL sources (ESS). At present, FileMaker can integrate data tables from the following external SQL sources:

• Oracle 10g or 11g

• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or 2008

• MySQL 5.1 Community Edition (free)

Each of these data sources has its own set of field sizes and limitations. If you’re integrating one or more of these external sources into a FileMaker solution, you also need to be aware of the different limits and features of the data types in the other data sources you use. Date and number fields in external sources might have different ranges from their FileMaker counterparts, for example.

→ For more discussion of the differences between FileMaker and SQL field types, and some links to reference material on the supported SQL data types, see Chapter 4, “Field Types and Import/Export Formats.”