Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

SQL-based replacement for Filemaker Pro?

(1/2) > >>

JavaJones:
Hi everyone, about 6 months ago I took a job as Technical Coordinator for a small nutrition education institution in Northern California. We currently use a fairly large and complex Filemaker Pro database to manage most of our info on students and other contacts. We have about 20,000 records, 15 or so active layouts (30 or so total) and several hundred database fields, including about 15-20 calculated fields. We use this database over our LAN as well as hosted to the outside world for remote use by our 2 other campuses.

We are soon to be embarking on a massive effort to move much of our business online. As part of that process we would very much like to sever our ties to running our own server for Filemaker, licensing Filemaker (we will need to pay for a costly upgrade soon if we want to expand to host more simultaneous users), and hopefully also end up with a greater ability to integrate our database with other parts of our business. We would like to work on automating a lot of things based on database info and changes.

To this end we are now looking at solutions for online databases and, more importantly, database management and front-ends. I know SQL can handle pretty much everything our Filemaker DB is doing as far as back-end storage is concerned. What we need - and what I am not yet aware of - is a replacement for the incredibly easy and powerful Filemaker Pro front end database manager and layout system. For those of you not familiar with Filemaker, it's basically like a more accessible version of Access. ;) The underlying structure is normal database fields, which are basically containers for data of a (possibly) specified type, or in some cases calculated values based on other fields. You enter data through fields, you can control how data is entered, data validation, etc. For our purposes it's also extremely important that there is powerful layout and visual formatting support. You can easily and fully control font, color, size, embossing, borders, text wrapping, draw boxes and lines, create buttons that lead to other layouts, etc, etc. For the low-end DB admin it's basically a dream come true. You can do many of the powerful things high-end DB's can do, but through a really simple interface.

So basically what we need is Filemaker but web-based and using SQL as the storage engine. This could be realized through any one of many different ways, but I know of none yet that is really an adequate solution. It may even be possible to make a local install of Filemaker interact with a remote SQL DB and use Filemaker as the front end - that would be great, but if that's possible to do well and seamlessly I'm not aware of it. Preferably we would find a tool that basically allowed everything Filemaker does, either totally online, or using a local management tool that interacted with the remote DB (like Drupal, or is it Plone?).

Is anyone aware of anything even remotely like this? If no such application exists it seems like there's probably a good market for it! I'll help fund development if someone wants to create it. ;) Basically combine an SQL management front end with a WYSIWYG web editor. :D

Any help is greatly appreciated and will be rewarded with credits!

- Oshyan

Rover:
Hey JJ -

Sounds like the Grail to me.  I'll be very interested in responses you get.  I would love to find something like you describe. :)

bmm:
I would recommend you to take a look at Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (XE). It is a completely free version of the Oracle Database with the catch that it is limited to 4 GB of user data and can only take advantage of 1 CPU and 1 GB ram no matter if the server has multiple CPU's and/or more ram. A number of other advanced features are also not available (check the FAQ at the link below) but it is still a very capable database for many types of applications.

Now the important feature of Oracle XE is Oracle Application Express (APEX) - a rapid web application development and administration tool that works entirely through a browser. Granted it is not entirely WYSIWYG as you define the properties of a page and APEX then renders the page based on these properties but it is still very easy to create an application through the use of the many wizards.

Oracle XE is available for both Windows and Linux.

Oracle XE:
http://otn.oracle.com/xe
Oracle APEX:
http://otn.oracle.com/apex
Screencast of Oracle APEX: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/viewlets/apex_quicktour_viewlet.html

JavaJones:
Hmm! I shall definitely check that out, thanks!

While I'm looking into Oracle, here are some other things I'm contemplating.

First, it seems like it might be fairly easy to integrate/link our existing FMP system with an SQL DB. This would allow us to interface some PHP-based web tools and systems that could operate on the data, while still using our existing FMP licenses, database, layouts, etc. So this isn't a full solution but might ultimately be the best as it means much less retraining. Really the best of both worlds. The only drawbacks are dual database formats, translation speed issues, and license costs of Filemaker.

Second, there is this interesting product I'm looking at: http://www.servoy.com/
Sounds like it might be a bit more complex/difficult than I'm hoping for, but if I learn the system it might be just right. It claims to have "WYSIWYG" form design, for example. And there's some kind of free trial available, so I'll definitely check that out.

Whatever we choose I'll report back here about it for those who are interested.

- Oshyan

mouser:
another thing to consider is something like Ruby on Rails, which has some pretty clever database management stuff that takes only a few lines of code to write.. depends how much custom scripting you want/need.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page