The Importance of Maintaining Data Integrity and Availability In FileMaker Pro Databases
By:
Steven H. Blackwell
Platinum Member, FileMaker Business Alliance
FileMaker 8 Certified Developer
FileMaker 7 Certified Developer
Comprehensive, real-time maintenance of data integrity and data availability in FileMaker Pro databases is an on-going and significant challenge for business owners, database developers, database administrators (DBA’s), and IS/IT managers in organizations of all types and sizes. Whether you are a government agency in the health care field, an airline maintenance department, a small business providing commercial dish-washing facilities for the food services industry, a business trade association or professional society, or a small dry-cleaning business contractor on a military base, you have to be able to rely on the fact that your data will be available when needed and that those data are accurate and complete.
Like the Dark Force from some science fiction movie, there are a host of elements that ceaselessly conspire to attack the availability and integrity of your data day in and day out. And hovering over many database installations are also a myriad of regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, the European Union’s Basel II, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and the Buckley Act—to name just a few.
What can go wrong? And given that accidents can happen even in the best-regulated of households, when things do go wrong, how can DBA’s and IS/IT people fix them? And given that in many small businesses the business owner is the DBA and lacks formal DBA or IS/IT training, how does that business owner recover from what could be a disaster?
In this paper I will detail a number of errors and events that can occur. I will also explain some concepts for addressing, mitigating, and even reversing those errors. I will focus particularly on the difficult issues of deletion management, of backup reconciliation, both roll-back and roll-forward, and of regulatory compliance.
To read the rest of this article, http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/187893/
FileMaker Pro Version ???
December 26th 2006
It is now eleven years now—almost exactly to the day—since the venerable Claris introduced FileMaker Pro 3.0v1, and the products and the company entered the first phase of the Modern Era of desktop databases. The product and the company have both evolved markedly since then. Indeed the introduction by FileMaker, Inc, of FileMaker Pro 7 in March of 2004 was revolutionary rather than evolutionary. That introduction ushered in the second phase of the Modern Era of desktop databases.
Surprisingly and disappointingly to me, any number of organizations and individuals still linger in the first phase and have never made the transition to the more powerful, more useful, and yes, more complex second phase versions. While I sincerely wish these folks well, both time and tide (so to speak) have passed. Unless they do move to the second phase of the Modern Era, they won’t be part of FileMaker’s future. And sadly, neither will FileMaker be part of theirs, if they have one.
All of which raises the interesting question of what that FileMaker future may be. What will the products be like and how will they function? What features and capabilities will they have? How will developers learn to use them successfully and correctly? Despite bemoaning wails on many FileMaker oriented sites and lists to the contrary, the company pays very close attention to feature requests. It both solicits them and receives others unsolicited as well. An entire team of high level and very professional people spends a huge amount of time and effort trying to determine the best mix of features for the products. Their work is for the most part unsung and unheralded; indeed most on the outside have no idea of their existence or of their Herculean efforts.
All this focus on future versions raises of course the question of what features not now part of the product would developers like to see introduced? As noted, FileMaker, Inc. collects this information in a variety of ways. But now, those clever folks at the FMPUG have gone a step further. They have introduced a new FileMaker Feature Requests site where developers can request new features, explain why they want them, and explain what they will do. More interestingly, developers can also vote on feature requests offered by their colleagues.
So…go on over to the FMPUG site and enter your feature request and vote on other developers’ requests.
Steven H. Blackwell