I have a little experience with FMPro v5. We have it here at my lab, but don't use it extensively. In our setup, when you load FMP and select a database, FMP has "remembered" the last search criteria of that database and those records are now the subset of records available to BROWSE (scroll) through, not the entire database. The user must do a FIND to access other records in the database. It is fairly fast at retrieving records, but seems a bit slow at sorting (this is on a fairly slow computer).
It sounds like from your example that when you press Ctrl-Down to see the previous record that this previous record is a part of that subset of records available to "browse", and is already loaded in memory, and so seeing that record would be fast. Am I correct on this?
This would be a different scenario than what you are asking about Sesame doing a complicated search on several criteria. Sesame does not (by default) load a "result set" of records. The user must do a search. It would take time to search the database, but once Sesame has retrieved that "result set" of records, moving from one record to another would be instantaneous. (Am I correct that you are wanting to compare the speed of accessing a record in FMP that is already part of the subset of records that has already been loaded into memory, vs. Sesame doing a search on one or more criteria?)
I cannot offer any better comments about FMP, and am probably not doing a good job of discussing it. I have not done a comparison to Sesame. From reading about Sesame, the amount of RAM available is an important consideration. I'm sure one of the Lanticans (probably Mark) will offer more specifics.
Either here on the Forum, or in the last Inside Sesame newsletter, someone mentioned something that might be of value. They were asking about the amount of time it took to load the database. The reply was to use one of the network licenses to keep that database loaded, and then access to it would be instantaneous, rather than having to wait for it to load. That would mean having an extra license for this purpose, but might be a worthwhile business investment to provide rapid information to customers, clients, etc.
Would it be feasible to export your 10K record database and the 86K record lineitem database, and try to create a Sesame application and import the data to do a test? A demo version of Sesame is available, and I don't think it is "crippled" in any of the features you would need. (If I'm wrong, somebody speak up!)
Hope I've offered some food for thought!
T.J.
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