We have a huge amount of activities on our calendar and it's bogging down the program. The file size has become quite large and is time consuming to back up, and to open and navigate remotely. Are there any suggestions for improving performance on a calendar based database, knowing that removing past events is not an option?

Well our newest calendar is considerably faster, especially when opened remotely. You could import some / all of your events into the new demo, load that on your server, and see if the speed increase is enough for you.

http://www.seedcode.com/downloads

As for the file being to large to backup, is it just the calendar file that is getting large? Are there pictures or linked files in there or is it just appointments? The new calendar has a "thinner" events table so the same number of records will be smaller in size, but we usually don't hear about file size problems with "just" appointment records. Let me know.

I monitor the picture file size weekly, and the end users don't know how to attach anything else. What file size do you recommend to be the max?

We have 9 seperate databases, and most of them are just fine, but one business in particular has an outrageous number of activities in their database. I don't know what else it could be.

I'd suggest you do one of two things, ideally both:

1. Move the pictures out to their own related file, even if it is 1:1 with the appointments table. This way you're backing up just the pictures file, perhaps on a different schedule.

2. Use SuperContainer to store the images instead of putting them in FileMaker container fields. You can learn more here: http://www.360works.com/supercontainer/

Best,

John

Ahh! I downloaded the supercontainer demo like you suggested, but I'm having trouble with it! Every contact in my database has the same picture! I'm sure I'm missing something, but I can't figure out what it is. Here's my calculation for the web viewer:

"http://(ipaddress):8020/supercontainer/files/CPM images/" & Contact::ContactPhoto

Any suggestions?

Hi,

You probably want Contact::ContactPhoto to be Contact::ContactID, where ContactID is the primary key or unique ID in your contact's file.

You can get help on SuperContainer here: http://fmforums.com/forum/showforum.php ... container/

Thanks John.