Data Wrangling with FileMaker

By Jerry Pournelle

April 4, 2005

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Data Extraction and Publishing for Neophytes

A few months back (Dec 2004), we discussed using MyODBC to extract data from a live MySQL database. MySQL is the guru-friendly open-source SQL database, very popular for back-end data on web sites, and powerful enough that some businesses rely on it for enterprise-level data. It still doesn't scale to the same heights as Oracle or SQL Server, but you're probably relying on it already, to collect web site statistics or process your online credit card orders.

MyODBC is the open-source link Open DataBase Connector (ODBC) that provides a data source for extracting from MySQL; you can read about or download it here. In December, we talked about using MyODBC to extract data from MySQL into Access and Excel; the same tools allow you to extract data into FileMaker, and similar ones from FileMaker into Excel. As with almost every software task involving multiple applications, data extraction is more complex than it should be.

FileMaker 7: A Database for the Rest of Us

FileMaker has been around for over twenty years—first sold by Nashoba Systems, it was later absorbed into Claris, a part of Apple. Nashoba first developed "Nutshell," a database whose very existence I had forgotten until reading a history of the company; Nutshell was sold by Leading Edge, a hardware/software marketing company now long gone. In the present day, FileMaker Inc. (still a division of Apple) has been selling Version 7 since mid-2004; it's much improved over previous versions, but it's still very cross-platform (at least, Windows and Mac), and is still the most user-friendly database we've tried.

FileMaker is unique in how simply an average Joe can make relatively complex, and easily used, databases and share them among users, and in how powerful the final results are.

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