What’s New?

• FileMaker Server for Linux is officially released!

• FileMaker Server now includes many performance optimizations such as parallel indexed finds and sorting on server, resulting in 98% faster adds, finds and deletes on average compared to 19.0.

• Startup restoration has been removed from the product and replaced with a more stable shared lock mechanism.

• Upgrading FileMaker Server will now preserve most settings to help speed up the upgrade process.

• FileMaker Developer Subscription (FDS) is free through December 31, 2020.

• We anticipate 3 releases per year of the FileMaker platform.

FileMaker Server 19.1

This version of FileMaker Server will prove to be a milestone release with the official go-live of FileMaker Server for Linux, faster upgrades, and the scalability improvements in FileMaker Server.

Faster Upgrades

Upgrading FileMaker Server will now preserve most settings, significantly reducing the time it takes to perform the upgrade process. In this case FileMaker Server 19.1 will preserve most settings if upgrading from 18 or 19.0 to 19.1, and future versions of FileMaker Server will preserve settings in a similar fashion. This is a very welcome change to the product and will be a critical feature to help keep customers current on the latest version of FileMaker Server.

Performance Enhancements

FileMaker Server 19.1 brings a whole host of performance enhancements that will help the FileMaker platform scale and to increase performance over the WAN. Central to these enhancements is a low-level optimization for file access wherein FileMaker Server is able to use a sharing lock for read access to the database to allow for multiple threads to read a file at the same time. In other words, multiple users can read the same data at the same time without waiting in line.

The enhancements include:

• Parallel indexed finds. Indexed finds on the same data can now be run in parallel thanks to the sharing lock. Of all the server enhancements, this one is the most important in regards to the FileMaker platform scaling, and is the reason Startup Restoration was removed as it makes Startup Restoration obsolete.

• Sorting on server. FileMaker Server will now sort records on server unless its CPU usage is above a certain threshold, significantly increasing performance of sorting over the WAN. Note that this will only work if paired with FileMaker Pro, Go or WebDirect 19.1 or later. 

• Increased stability with progressive backups and full backups. Improvements in how backup operations handle flushing pages will help prevent live locks and dead locks, preventing very slow backups or backups not running.

Summary

FileMaker Server 19.1 is a great first agile release of the product and has some features that are going to be critical for the growth of the Claris platform. We look forward to the ease of upgrading, the scalability enhancements and the ability to install FileMaker Server on Linux. Contact DB Services at any time if you have questions or needs with Claris FileMaker Server!