Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Manual Indexing
In very large databases, there may come a time when you want to adjust indexing manually.
For instance, if you know you only very rarely search by a person's middle name, you can
tell FileMaker not to index that field. Searches that include that field may seem slower, but
that's OK since you hardly ever do it. On the Field Options Storage tab, select None to turn
indexing off for any field.
If you want to be able to search efficiently in a field, turn on All instead. The third
choice—Minimal—creates a smaller index for text fields and stored calculations with text
results. For all other field types and calculations with non-text results, Minimal indexing
doesn't apply (and this button is disabled). This index has everything FileMaker needs for re-
lationships and field uniqueness, but not enough for fast searching. If you
don't
need to
search in a field, but you
do
need it indexed for other reasons, then choose Minimal.
When None is selected, you can keep FileMaker's automatically-turn-it-on-when-I-need-it
behavior by turning on “Automatically create indexes as needed.”
NOTE
FileMaker uses the field index when you do a find from Find mode, but
not
when you use the Find/
Replace command. The index points FileMaker to
records
, and since Find/Replace doesn't find re-
cords (it finds text inside a record or records), the index does it no good. Therefore, when you do a
Find/Replace, you don't make FileMaker automatically index a field.
Indexing Language
To keep its indexes as small and tidy as possible, FileMaker doesn't actually store all a
field's text (or dates or numbers) in the index. Instead, it performs a little cleanup on the field
values first. Most notably, it gets rid of the notion of uppercase and lowercase letters: “Peter”
and “peter” become the same entry in the index.
The index also splits the field value up into individual words and removes any characters that
aren't generally part of a normal word. In order to do that, it needs to know what language
the text in the field is in. If your computer's regional settings are for English, then
FileMaker's field indexes use English, too. Usually, that's exactly what you want. But in
some cases, FileMaker's following the same language rules as your computer can cause a
problem. For example, if you enter another language in a field without changing the index,
then your searches can give you unexpected results. If you search in an English-indexed field
for
lang
(German for “long”), then you get both “lang” and “länger” (“longer”), but if you
set the index to German, you only get “lang.” (In German, “ä” is a different character from
“a.”)
