Tag: FileMaker Server

The Metadata-verse: FileMaker Server Save as XML

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, Claris Development, FileMaker, FileMaker 19, InspectorPro, Integration, Performance, Tools & Add-ons

As Claris gets further into an Agile groove, there are product releases more often, always with new features and improvements. Claris FileMaker 19.5 is no exception. It includes many new features, expanded extensibility, performance enhancements, and reliability improvements. I want to bring attention to one simple thing that promises to change the world for many of us in the FileMaker developer community: Save a Copy as XML…and the performance improvements running this on FileMaker Server.

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FileMaker Performance on Apple M1 | Astounding!

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in Claris Development, FileMaker, FileMaker 19, FileMaker Server, News, Performance, Server Administration, Tableau FM, Testing

When the Apple silicon Macs with M1 chips came out, I read and watched many of the reviews. Most of them had great things to say about the promise of Apple’s new M1 chip…I was impressed. When I finally received my Apple M1 MacBook Pro, and started to use it…I was amazed.

Back in 2020, FileMaker Pro 19.2 wasn’t optimized yet for Apple silicon processors, but ran fine under Rosetta emulation. On my M1 MacBook Pro, it already felt much faster than running FileMaker “natively” on an Intel-based MacBook…I was astonished.

Today, I’m running the just-released Claris FileMaker® 19.3, with native support for Apple’s M1 chip, on a new MacBook Pro. It is, in a word: Astounding!

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Summarizing FileMaker Server Access.log data

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker Server, Server Administration, Techniques

Various times I’ve needed to do some quick summaries of how a given server and its databases were being used. When using Mac OS X, I may use shell commands to get a quick summary of what’s happening on a particular server.

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Listing hosted FileMaker files from the shell

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Techniques

As part of a shell script I’m cooking up, one of the required tasks is to list all currently hosted database files on a Mac OS based FileMaker server. This may get deployed over multiple servers, and I want to keep it as simple and trouble free as possible.

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What Are Your Imports Waiting For? FileMaker Perform Script on Server – Episode II

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker Server, Performance, Techniques

Introduction

I hope that since our previous blog post you have been exploring the possibilities created by FileMaker’s Perform Script on Server (PSoS). This article is a continuation of the PSoS discussion and includes more cool things you can do with it, specifically running database imports on FileMaker Server.

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100x Faster – Flight Testing FileMaker Perform Script on Server – Episode I

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker Server, Performance, Techniques

Read the follow up to this blog post at What Are Your Imports Waiting For? FileMaker Perform Script on Server – Part II

Introduction

Since the release of FileMaker 13 we have been exploring a new feature called “Perform Script on Server” (PSoS) and trust me there are many cool things you can do with it. I’m going to describe how PSoS works, how it’s best implemented, and how our tests show PSoS can drastically improve database performance, more than 100x in some situations. However, there are also a number of considerations before you run wild and convert scripts to execute via PSoS. So, I’ll cover these as well.

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Java Applet Issues with Java 7 Update 51

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques

Applets now are required to contain additional information in their .jnlp files to document the files used, either external or local. But if you are working with older code, such as the FileMaker 11 Server Admin Console, the required manifest information is missing and your applet will halt with an exception like this:

java.lang.SecurityException: Missing required Permissions manifest attribute in main jar: http://localhost:16000/admin-client-lib/admin-console-client.jar
    at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.doLaunchApp(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.run(Unknown Source)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:744)

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Enable Logging of Client Usage Statistics in FileMaker Server

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Techniques

I was looking for a way to monitor client usage of FileMaker Servers over time.

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Summarize how often databases are opened in FileMaker Server

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Techniques

We needed to quickly know how often various databases were being opened on a client’s server.

If you have Access logging enabled and are using a Mac OS based system, this shell snippet will give you a nice summary of how often each database has been opened:

awk -F" '{ if($3 == " opening database ") print $4;}' '/Library/FileMaker Server/Logs/Access.log' | sort | uniq -c

Unfortunately, it won’t show you a count for databases that were never opened within the scope of the current access log.

Simon.

Fail2Ban with FileMaker Server

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Techniques

I needed to configure a FileMaker Server (FMS) that would be an isolated system and accessible via the Internet.

Besides other precautions, like locking it down on the firewall as much as possible, changing the default SSH port, etc., I wanted to give the system some ability to defend itself against malicious access. FMS will prevent this to some extent, largely due to how the FMS Admin Console and the FileMaker client are designed.

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Recipe for testing JDBC connection to FileMaker Server

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques

FileMaker Server Advanced allows external systems to connect to its hosted database files via ODBC and JDBC. The remote systems can then run SQL commands against the hosted databases. Often the hard part is getting all the infrastructure ready for this. That includes the correct extended permissions on the FileMaker database file, needed drivers, firewall settings, etc.

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