FileMaker Pro to 4th Dimension Quickstart Guide

Enter 4th Dimension

We believe that that tool should be 4th Dimension. 4th Dimension solves the basic problems inherent in FileMaker Pro development.

4th Dimension includes a full-featured programming language that offers you limitless flexibility in development. Imagine if you could write your scripts in a text editor, then copy and paste them into your database. Imagine if you could define your own calculation functions on the fly, and reference them elsewhere in your database. With 4th Dimension you can do all that and much more.

4th Dimension is a high performance database. It can be used as a stand-alone application and has no problem handling hundreds of thousands and even millions of records. With 4D Server, 4th Dimension databases have a true client/server architecture, which allows intensive operations such as finding and sorting to be performed on the server. This avoids the bottleneck of your network’s bandwidth, and out-performs other development environments in the most important areas: finding, sorting, and reporting. In addition, 4th Dimension has a native machine language compiler that automatically reduces your code into platform specific machine language. For example, looping 1,000,000 times to perform a calculation takes less than a second. Whether you are discussing the speed of its data engine or the techniques you can use to achieve the highest performance, 4th Dimension provides fantastic performance.

4th Dimension offers superior security. For one thing, there is a unified security manager for your entire database. Instead of needing to define a new password for each file, you define it in one centralised location, once. And since a 4th Dimension database can be compiled into machine code, you can completely remove all design-level access and source code from your compiled solutions, thus absolutely protecting your intellectual property.

Since 4th Dimension stores the data and the structure of the database in two separate files on disk, updating an existing solution is a breeze. When a new version is available, simply swap the new structure file for the old one. There's no need for importing the existing data into the new structure, greatly simplifying the process of updating already deployed solutions. With 4D Server, the next time a user connects to the database, the new version is available. Furthermore, as a user visits areas of an application, 4th Dimension builds up a persistent cache of the layouts and code on the user’s machine. This further reduces network traffic.