Forgot how nice it was to use Filemaker 8.5 and 5.0 on older macs

[FacnyFreddy]

Not the fastest platform for doing HUGE csv imports into a table, but, I got it working after digging out my old copy of FMP 8.5 and 5.0 [i do NOT recommend running FMP 8 or 9 on a G3 under 400MHz and less than 512MB of RAM]

One thing that was weird, when I loaded FMP 8.5 onto my XP VM, I was dealing with a corrupted PEM for root and server. I had to copy the PEM files over from my G3 Pismo (after a fresh install on Tiger) to get it to "see" the network instances.

When last I used FMP 8 (or 9 for that matter) was when we had a G4 mac mini as our "team" server running FM Server 9 on Tiger. We switched over to a FM Server "Advanced" on a Mac Pro running Leopard on a dual-G5 and 4GB of RAM. It was like nigh-n-day difference in performance and web apps we ran seemed to just scream along. When we got the 8-core Mac Pro with 8GB into production with FM Server 9 (or 10?), and big-fast 7200 RPM drives in a RAID-10 setup, we had more people using FM apps than Oracle Apps.

IT had a snit-fit because they had to setup user accounts on both systems and didn't like having a pair of "towers" taking up precious space in their APC racks. The G5 for dev and the 2006 Pro for Production.

A bit of fond memories from those days...

 

[beachycove]

Fabulous software, over the years, though using it to the full hasn't been a job for ordinary mortals for quite a few iterations. My level of competence peaks somewhere in the FileMaker 3-5 era!

 

[Cory5412]

I like FileMaker a lot, have always felt like I was under-using it. Even in the FileMaker/Pro 2 era where they for black-and-white compact Macs.

Regarding IT: When was that? If recently, I'm surprised they didn't just draft an MOU to charge your department per rack-unit of space available amp of power and network connections, and then have their fit about running a G5 and an '06MP, complete with versions of OS X and a networked server app that aren't getting patches any more.

 

[FacnyFreddy]

This was "a ways back" and the golems who ran the datacenter were as anti-mac as you can expect.

We had Leopard with a couple of custom patches on the 06 doing laps around the $500K Sparc servers with the Xeon quad core setups. Putting the web services on a different box than the DB also made it alot more scalable.

But the G5 systems certainly held their own for quite some time. Just could not get more than 2 cpu boxes by the time the x86 switch took place.

The G4DP MDD systems were not quite fast enough after we went production... And so the budget for a pair of G5s were considered "reasonable". IT still wanted us to use Sparc servers with 16GB and 12 core boxes at nearly 10x the cost. Our Sun sales rep was a turd. The Oracle rep was no better.

The Apple/Filemaker team stepped up when ever we asked for help and even pitched in with our preso.

I think our largest DB (single dataset) was over 900GB and by that time we switched to Oracle for all the repositories and left only the fact tables in local (non-ODBC) data stores.