Considering FileMaker or Access for a Starter Database
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@BRRABill said:
Are you sure they aren't related?
I will admit to not looking closely, but they look related.
They are related, same company, but one is the site for the database, the other is the site for the commercial services and add ons for the database. So looking at commercial support contracts and non-open software licenses will be very misleading compared to only looking at the free and open database product itself.
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Many major OSes include MongoDB as well. MongoDB is provided with products like CentOS, RHEL and Ubuntu.
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@BRRABill said:
Are you sure they aren't related?
I will admit to not looking closely, but they look related.
It's pretty common for Opensource firms to make their money off offering enterprise support agreements.
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I have supported FM server here for the past 5.5 years (Versions 10-13, so far). It is OK from a small-scale perspective but like you said above, you don't want to look small-scale, especially since you will almost surely trap yourself. As far as I can tell, FM does not scale well. Our FM guy is a co-owner and taught himself how to create and maintain FM databases and he is pretty good at it. However, I am sure there are things he has done that were taking the long way around with a sort of house of cards effect. I would say that over half of our business relies on the 25 or so databases he has created.
We also use an ERP program, Southware (which seems horribly antiquated) for things like inventory, AR and AP. The only thing I do for that is deploy the thin-client software and maintain the windows server that it runs on, as we have a consultant company that specializes in it. We have tried to move off it several times but since we have customized it so much, we are pretty much stuck with it.
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@wrx7m said:
I have supported FM server here for the past 5.5 years (Versions 10-13, so far). It is OK from a small-scale perspective but like you said above, you don't want to look small-scale, especially since you will almost surely trap yourself. As far as I can tell, FM does not scale well. Our FM guy is a co-owner and taught himself how to create and maintain FM databases and he is pretty good at it. However, I am sure there are things he has done that were taking the long way around with a sort of house of cards effect. I would say that over half of our business relies on the 25 or so databases he has created.
I supported FM for a company, NTG's second MSP customer, actually, for over a decade and it does its job well enough for what it is. But there is no doubt that it's extremely limiting in every possible way. They use it for a three person office that was two people in 2001 when the company started and grew to whopping.... two people over a decade later. During the summers they go up to three people for a few months during their busy season. For a company with zero growth and no high reliability demands (it can be down for a month at times without an issue) it worked fine. But, very limiting and they have had to pay a bit for it over the years and I'm not sure that a spreadsheet would not have been cheaper and easier.
