« MBS Real Studio Plugi… | Home | 12 years of Mac OS X … »

SQL Connectivity for FileMaker

Well, in Filemaker, you can use ODBC Data sources to connect to SQL Databases and use them in Filemaker. But what if you need more flexibility or other features? Like...
  • having database server user selectable, so your users can decide on runtime which server is used with what credentials?
  • you simple want to call a store procedure on a SQL Server to trigger something on a database?
  • you simply want to run a query to lookup some value.
  • executing a special SQL command, for example to cleanup database?
  • Export/Import data from sqlite database file.
  • access database of some other application to directly change a value
As you see, there are quite a few use cases where you need SQL connectivity to run commands or query data directly with a SQL server. Especially as SQlite gets more popular for single user applications, read or writing values there is very interesting. For example when using Aperture application from Apple, you could read details from the database about the pictures you have directly.

To enable this, our new Filemaker plugin with version 2.6 supports connecting to Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Sybase, Informix, InterBase, SQLBase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, ODBC and SQLite databases. You can connect and execute commands. And if your command is a query, you can query result set with data. Also you can easily call stored procedures and pass parameters. As we support using prepared statements, you can set parameters for SQL queries and avoid SQL inject attacks.

This plugin is based on SQLAPI and you can read about server specific things on their documentation. As you see in our SQL.SetConnectionOption, you tell the plugin where to find the client library for the database you want. This way we can keep the plugin smaller and simply connect to the newest client library. Once the database client and library is specified, you can connect and run your queries.

We have a guide about it and if you have questions, please contact us. You can read all new SQL functions and our SQL guide. Claris FileMaker Plugin
10 02 12 - 14:13