Filemaker Server 9 Crashing Issues

I wanted to get this post in, because there is not much information on this subject around the net, but I also wanted to stay with the theme of the blog. Follow along to see how I do. If you are reading for blogging tips, continue.

Have you ever searched and searched on Google for a subject and just never found your answer. Try this. Try that. Try the next. Then you find the answer by accident a few days later.

I have done this more than a few times. What I ran into was that I was not using the correct terminology. I knew what I meant in lay terms but not in the technical terms the answer was written.

There is awesome software called Filemaker Pro that we use to track sales, inventory, etc. at All About Doors. It is strong software. You can do just about anything you want with it.

Filemaker just came out with version 9 of its server software. I installed it here and it crashed daily. So we rolled it back to version 7 until we could figure it out.

I spent days searching for why the Server would crash, searching for phrases similiar to the title of this post. I should have been searching for "damaged files in Filemaker Pro" or "corrupted Filemaker Pro" files.

In turns out that Filemaker Pro 9 and Filemaker Server 9 both check the integrity of the database before using it. The database we were having issue with was huge, but there was hidden errors in it. Whenever we sorted the whole database, the server would hang.

The solution: Open the database in Filemaker 7 or the last version that it worked with. If you try to compact it in the newer version, it will freeze up in the middle. At least that’s what it did to me. Don’t open it via the server. Open it locally. Then choose "Save a Copy As" from the File menu. Choose compacted copy. Use this copy on your new server.

It seems the initial check by Filemaker 9 doesn’t catch everything. But once you do a sort that goes through all the records, it will hit a damaged record and freeze.

Back to bringing this post into the theme of my site. I figured that others will be searching the same way I did and never find the answer, so I titled this post similar to my initial searches, hoping to catch those hits. What I will do with Filemaker hits, I’m not sure. But this technique works for just about any subject.

There are people just like you out there. Use your issues to build traffic by addressing your issues and gearing your post to how you searched.