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Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

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Alpha Five vs. Filmaker Pro

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    #1

    Alpha Five vs. Filmaker Pro

    I'm in the process of purchasing a new database and would like to hear from all the pros and cons of Alpha 5 and/or how it rates as compared to Filemaker Pro

    Thanks for any input

    Michael Taylor
    Tags: None
    #2
    RE: Alpha Five vs. Filmaker Pro

    Michael,

    There was a fairly recent thread discussing this issue not too long ago. Actually, I think there were more than one that at least refered to the issue in one context or another. Try doing a search on "Filemaker".

    Comment

      #3
      RE: Alpha Five vs. Filmaker Pro

      FileMaker Pro is a nice product. It does what it does quite well and most of its features are easily accessable. It has some features A5 does not and is certainly more visible in the retail area.

      Having said that, I find myself working with A5 for the same reason that Lotus Approach is sitting on the shelf (another easy to use, fairly capable product). When you've gotten to a certain point with either product, they are out of capabilities where A5 has more to offer that are still reasonably easy to use.

      I think A5 has the best combination of power and ease of use of any of the products I've tried, and the Alpha DOS products come in close behind. That doesn't mean that they are the easiest to use, but you get more "bang" for the effort you invest and you can do an incredible amount without having to learn to program (which would get you into a discussion of the other database products on the market).

      Comment

        #4
        RE: Alpha Five vs. Filmaker Pro

        Haven't looked a Filemaker for a long time. Since I started using A5 (actually, A4), I've stopped using all other databases for work. (I've looked at a number of others but was disappointed with capabilities, etc, and never went any further with them.)

        If you use A5 you'll be using a database which has the best user support in the market. Development time is easily 1/10th of what it is using Access and others. A5's capabilities are also much more extensive. The only really weak areas I've seen deal with graphical representation of data (pie/bar charts, etc), which apparently XBASIC doesn't support. You can "kinda" simulate bar charts using text characters (maybe I'll do one up for the code archives).

        v5 has a lot of major enhancements, many of which may not be replicated in other databases. We've been running v5 beta in production (transaction and reporting operations) with minimal problems (no more heap locks in v5).

        Sorry that this isn't a feature-by-feature comparison. After using A5 I haven't had the need to use other databases, and probably won't ever have to (if A5 is ported to Linux).

        Comment

          #5
          RE: Alpha Five vs. Filmaker Pro

          Thanks to everyone for the information.

          Michael Taylor

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