Last September I wrote an article about a custom function that I optimized to evaluate hundreds times faster. At the end of the article, I challenged my readers and myself by claiming that the already optimized custom function can be optimized even further. Do you remember?

Later on I actually really optimized it again, and talked about this optimization during my session at Pause On Error [x] London 2011. Now you can watch the video of this part of my session below:

Continue reading: Marvelous Optimization #4 – Optimized Again

This example demonstrates that even a single-step script can be optimized. You just have to think a little bit out of the box…

I was showing this as a surprise in my session Marvelous Optimizations at Pause On Error [x] London 2011. I used a sample file with 25 fields and 5,000 records and imported these records 5 times in a row in just 13 seconds. OK, 13 seconds is not bad but what if you need to import data into FileMaker Go  over network? If you want to know how I imported the same data in less than 3 seconds, watch the following video from my Pause On Error session.

Continue reading: Marvelous Optimization #3 – Faster Imports

The second example I was showing in my session Marvelous Optimizations at Pause On Error [x] London 2011 was the script for selecting Random Set of Records. I found this example in the FileMaker Knowledge Base and optimized it to run at least 158 times faster when selecting 10 random records out of 50,000.

This version of the example has FM Bench Detective script steps included to measure the original and the optimized script more precisely. Watch the video recorded at Pause On Error below to learn more details about this optimization

Continue reading: Marvelous Optimization #2

This is the first example I was showing in my session Marvelous Optimizations at Pause On Error [x] London 2011. I already wrote about this optimization some time ago. It’s the one that led me to unveil the Marvelous Optimization Formula. You can find the original article here: FileMaker Script Execution Time Cut From 5 Hours To 6 Seconds

I simply took the example and added FM Bench Detective into it to be able to exactly measure and examine what happens in the slow and the optimized script. Now you can watch the result in this video recorded at Pause On Error.

Continue reading: Marvelous Optimization #1

This is a fresh story of me spending hours trying to fix a technical issue and accidentally revealing a gold nugget. A few days ago one of my nightly server-side scripts stopped working without any apparent reason. But when I tried to run the script in FileMaker Pro it worked just fine. I really needed a way to debug the script on the server.

Continue reading: Debugging Scripts by Writing to Event.log

I noticed that one of the articles updated in the official FileMaker Knowledge Base on September 23, 2011 was explaining how to select a random set of records in a FileMaker database. I was wondering how fast the currently recommended technique is and whether I can make it faster with the help of FM Bench. I tried to apply it to a set of 50,000 records of randomly generated data. Then I made it much faster…

Continue reading: Random Set of Records (optimized)

Two weeks ago I wrote an article about a FileMaker custom function I needed to preprocess some data imported from the web. I used this custom function in an auto-enter calculation to immediately preprocess the data while being imported. I created a server-side script that does the import every morning. But when I discovered that the import was taking over an hour every day, I saw it deserves some optimization. I used FM Bench Detective and optimized the custom function to evaluate up to several hundreds times faster…

Continue reading: Custom Function Optimized to Evaluate Hundreds Times Faster

Just today I needed to decode HTML encoded text in FileMaker. I thought this must have been done many times before, so I tried to search for a suitable custom function at BrianDunning.com and FMFunctions.com. After checking few functions I found one that seemed pretty good.

Continue reading: FileMaker Custom Function for HTML Entities

To attend or not to attend? That’s the question I am asking myself every year since 2002 when I attended my first FileMaker DevCon. I have attended 8 DevCons so far, and skipped one. I have identified the following 5 possible reasons for not attending

Continue reading: 5 reasons for not attending FileMaker DevCon

Everyone is excited about Lion. Even though many new features on Mac OS  X 10.7 are giving us improvements we kept asking for since 10.1, Apple has again succeeded in giving all the new features the strong essence of innovation that makes us unable to hesitate to install and try Lion out as soon as we are able to.

But we are also afraid. What if some important apps stop working?

Continue reading: Mac OS X 10.7 Lion – Upgrade or Wait?