FileMaker Pro 8.5 review

No Mac database roundup would be complete without mentioning FileMaker Pro, because it's ideal as a multi-user database for departmental groups.

Those bugbears that haunted previous versions (poor separation of code and data, one table to a file, poor provision for backup) have largely been done away with, and its ease of use has been greatly enhanced. FileMaker 8.5's new ability, via its web viewer layout object, to access web content directly or to create and view reports in an HTML format, is impressive.

For day-to-day work, FileMaker also plays very well with others. It can now read and write native Excel files, and although it can be difficult to use, you can export data via XML and XSLT into a variety of proprietary formats.

Pro 8.5's scripting environment, ScriptMaker, is still a point-and-click affair, which is ideal for the novice to quickly create working solutions. Support for custom menu bars and improved authentication tools also mean any applications you create can be made more end-user-proof than ever before.

Defining databases is a matter of creating tables and adding fields, and specifying the relationships between them. Like most desktop databases these days, creating a relationship is a matter of drag and drop, but FileMaker takes it one stage further, letting you create relationships based not on the strict equality required by SQL, but via comparison operators. However, this rather relaxed attitude to relationships (and indeed to data typing, which isn't enforced; type coercion is the name of the game) does make life difficult for FileMaker when it comes to integration with SQL databases.

FileMaker is fairly happy to act as either an ODBC or JDBC source for other databases or applications - and we're usually talking Word or Excel here - and it can read data from an ODBC source using a rather convoluted import method. And while this may work for occasional snapshots of a departmental data source, using scripted imports to synchronise the data can be tricky to implement reliably. This means FileMaker is a comparatively poor front end for an SQL database.

Is this really a problem for FileMaker? This depends on whether scalability is an issue for your operation. If you know you're never going to need more than 250 concurrent users at one time, then FileMaker Server Advanced's additional ability to share databases via the web without any effort may seem to make FileMaker the obvious choice. However, if those users are spread out geographically, its lack of replication and synchronisation tools may mean you really do need to look at some sort of SQL solution.