19.3. External SQL Sources

If you don't know MySQL from MySpace, and have no interest in taking your humble FileMaker skills to the hard-core level of IT professionals, then feel free to skip right past this section. But if you have to cross between these worlds or need to bring the power and capability of industrial-grade database servers into your systems, FileMaker's External SQL Sources (or ESS) feature will seem like magic.

In a nutshell, you point your FileMaker database in the general direction of an Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or MySQL (pronounced "my sequel") database (hereafter referred to as a SQL database). FileMaker then takes in information about that database, learning all it needs to know to make those normally complicated systems almost as easy to use as FileMaker. You can create table occurrences in your Relationships graph that are actually references to the tables in the SQL database. You can draw relationship lines between SQL tables, and even between your FileMaker tables and the SQL tables. You can create a layout based on a SQL table, drop a few fields on the layout, and then jump to Find mode, where FileMaker searches the real honest-to-goodness SQL data and shows you a found set of records.