Chapter 2. Specifications and Storage Limits

Knowing Your Limits

Whenever you work with a piece of software, it’s a good idea to be aware of the software’s limits, both practical and theoretical. Important design considerations can hinge on a correct appraisal of the capabilities of your tools. If you need to build a system that can correctly work with dates prior to those in the AD era, it’s a good idea to be aware of the storage capabilities of FileMaker’s date field type, for example.

Some of these limits are more theoretical than practical, and you’re better off observing the practical limits. We don’t recommend you build systems with a million tables, for example, or write calculations containing 30K of text. If you feel you need to push these upper limits, you may want to recheck your assumptions and, if necessary, rethink your approach.

Table 2.1 provides the limits of some of the most important measurable capacities of the FileMaker product line.

Table 2.1. FileMaker Limits

Notes

• Unicode characters take up a variable number of bits, dependent on the character, so it’s not possible to define a precise upper limit to the size of a text field.
• FileMaker Pro clients and ODBC/JDBC clients draw from the same pool of available connections on FileMaker Server/Server Advanced, so the upper limit is a total of 250 connected users of both types together. Of these, no more than 50 may be ODBC/JDBC users.