Appleworks Database

Becomes incredibly slow

[guitman]

Hi all
We use appleworks for the database feature for our ecommerce site and notice that it becomes incredibly slow after a while. We begin a new database for every year but it seems that lately we wait for ever for information to input properly and for the spinning ball to stop, it's a pain. does anyone have any suggestions

[timster]

Are you asking for suggestions about moving to another database solution? Because it sounds like you need to.

You could step up to FileMaker server, which should give you a decent performance boost.

Or, you could make the jump into the "real world" of databases, and create, say a PHP site with a MySQL back end, which is easily done with Mac OS X.

The choices are myriad, really. That said, if you give us some more specific that would help find a solution to fit your needs. How many records are in your database? How much traffic do you get on the site? How complicated is your database? What skillsets do you have at your organization?

[guitman]

Thank you for your response

all of our transactions are processed by 3'd party credit card processors off site and we enter them into our data base manually. In this case I'm not sure

My skill sets are basic I acquire skills as I go along. The site has done very well. We are obviously running into problems due to the volume of our sales.

[Macguru]

Welcome to the board guitman

>>we enter them into our data base manually.

Then I guess a plain vanilla FileMaker licence (not server) will be more than enough.

Try to limit the number of fields per file below 15 and you will probably not notice any performance hit until they reach 3 gig in size.

[guitman]

Thank you very much for your help It's very mush appreciated.

Jake

[timster]

all of our transactions are processed by 3'd party credit card processors off site and we enter them into our data base manually.

How much time does this involve? If this is just re-entering data from the processor site, and it's taking a chunk out of someone's day, then this sounds like something that could be pretty easily automated. If you're interested, just share the details.

[guitman]

Thanks for your response timster

Currently we are using two different payment processing systems PayPal and PaySystems. This could be a problem.

We have been using our current system to generate Shipping labels, however, since our business seems to be growing at about 60% for the current year it would be great to automate all of our transactions into one database which might allow us to use the date base to handle a lot of accounting issues as well.

I have a feeling that we will at some point have to limit our selves to one payment system to simplify these issues (we really want to be able to handle these things from anywhere in the world)

I don't know if I'm providing you with enough information to give you a comprehensive overview of our situation but I'm not sure what other information this would require.

I am astounded by the generosity of spirit and time of the members of this forum and I thank you all very much.

Jake

[Macguru]

Hi gitman,

timster has an exellent suggestion.

(WARNING : I am biased about FileMaker)
We use it internally for our business management.

I believe (not sure) such payment systems can send you sales datas in a variety of database formats that you could easily import in some database. If it is not the case, there are plenty of FileMaker developpers that publish plugins or Apple scripts as freeware or shareware.

For example do a search for "Mail to FileMaker Importer" . It not exactly what you need, but it can do part of the job already.

Custom developments with FileMaker can be done quite fast, to suit all your needs. I am sure you can find a local folk to help you with the transition.

[Macguru]

Hi guitman,

Some co-worker here has some experience with payment services such as PayPal. He told me their IPN tools datas can be relatively easy to format for almost any database formats, so you can process the sale with it. You can do this using ASP/VBScript, Cold Fusion, Java/JSP, PERL or PHP. So whathever is your server platform or whathever database solution you are using, it is possible.

PayPal as a manual here :

[paypal.com...]

There are plenty of open source scripts available to ease this process. Like this one :

[perlsources.com...]

There is also plenty of knowlegeable people in the ecommerce forum [webmasterworld.com] and in some scripting forums here (PERL, PHP, ASP...), depending on the scripting language used on your server.

[timster]

I'm not sure if you are running Mac OS X yet, guitman, but I figured I'd add that many of the database & programming languages MacGuru mentioned run well in OS X, including Perl, PHP, and Java. (That is, there's no reason to give up your Mac if you decide to move to a more powerful database.)

[guitman]

Hi Timster and macguru

Thank you for your replies. As of 3AM this morning we are expecting an addition to our family so for the next couple of days I can't really look at anything except keep up to our orders. But as soon as possible I'll get back ito the groove and will pursue this. Thanks both of you for your help and will talk to you soon.

Jake