Optimization

Marvelous #4

Marvelous Optimization #4 – Optimized Again

January 26, 2012

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 [...]

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Marvelous #3

Marvelous Optimization #3 – Faster Imports

December 11, 2011

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 [...]

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Marvelous #2

Marvelous Optimization #2

November 10, 2011

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 [...]

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Marvelous #1

Marvelous Optimization #1

November 7, 2011

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 [...]

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Dice

Random Set of Records (optimized)

September 29, 2011

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 [...]

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Custom Function Optimized

Custom Function Optimized to Evaluate Hundreds Times Faster

September 14, 2011

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 [...]

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Thumbnail image for 5 reasons for not attending FileMaker DevCon

5 reasons for not attending FileMaker DevCon

July 18, 2011

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:

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FileMaker Script Execution Time Cut From 5 Hours To 6 Seconds

March 17, 2011

Sometimes, not often, I accidentally achieve results that look too marvelous to be real. But they are. Just like in this case. Last week I assigned Petr, our internal system developer, the task to optimize one server-side script. The script recently started taking over 8 hours to run and reaching the expiration limit we have [...]

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