Concurrency Control

Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC)

FileMaker used pessimistic concurrent control to avoid conflicts. A record will be locked when someone starts editing it and the lock will only be released until the user issues commit. Users that try to modify concurrently will receive a message about invalid modification. The most recent release introduced the FileMaker Data API which adopts the concept of transaction and uses optimistic concurrent control. All updates within one transaction will be submitted altogether. If any related record is empty or is in use, then nothing gets updated.

Storage Model

N-ary Storage Model (Row/Record)

Query Interface

Custom API SQL

Users can write scripts by using FileMaker commands to perform queries. FileMaker also provides ExecuteSQL, which enables the user to perform an SQL query with the databases.

Views

Not Supported

Indexes

Inverted Index (Full Text)

FileMaker uses index for searching and joining related tables. It creates lists of the words or values in a field and stores references to its record. There are two types of indexes in FileMaker. A word index is for text fields while a value index is for numbers, dates, time, relationships, etc. Words are mostly defined by spaces as well as some special characters and support partial text search. In addition to searching and joins, the index can also be used to generate value lists which allows FileMaker to build pop-up menu quickly.

Query Execution

Tuple-at-a-Time Model

By default, FileMaker searches across all the fields to execute queries. Users can also perform vectorized searching in Browse mode by specifying one field.

Stored Procedures

Not Supported

Data Model

Relational

FileMaker is a relational database system. It follows the standard relational data model where a database consists of multiple connected tables. Data can be accessed through related tables.

Isolation Levels

Read Committed

FileMaker provides Read Committed isolation by having the pessimistic record locking. It is guaranteed that the lock is released only after commits and the version being read is the latest committed version. However, FileMaker has the client-side cache which may prevent the clients from reading the most recent version by looking at an outdated cache.

Logging

Not Supported

Query Compilation

Not Supported

System Architecture

Shared-Everything

FileMaker runs in a desktop environment.

Storage Architecture

Disk-oriented

FileMaker stores its data on disk. Changes will be stored temporarily in memory, i.e. in the cache and will be flushed to hard disk regularly. The cache size and the interval between flushing can be specified by users. Users can force FileMaker to migrate updates to disk by running a given script.

Checkpoints

Non-Blocking Consistent

When running the backup schedule, FileMaker creates an entire copy of the databases and creates a hard link pointing to the most recent backup if no changes have been made to the databases since then to improve backup performance. FileMaker also supports Progressive backup which only saves the delta changes. The backup schedule is not blocking in FileMaker where users can continue to update data during backups. When the copy finishes, database hosting will be blocked to sync the backup with the current databases.

Foreign Keys

Supported

FileMaker supports the foreign key constraint. By specifying a foreign key, the field can uniquely identify records in some related tables. FileMaker allows to have multiple foreign keys within one table and the values for foreign key don't have to be unique.