FMDeveloperTool hints and tricks

I started playing around with the FMDeveloperTool with a goal of understanding what is contributing to my database size.

  • First, you can download the standalone tool here:
    Claris Community (English)

  • Next, be aware there seems to be a bug - if your database has Container fields that use Open Storage, this makes the tool so slow that it is unusable (I waited over 3 hours before giving up). . A workaround is to add the -exclude_containers option which restores normal speed.

  • I wanted to know the size of each of my tables, using the -sortBySize command which will show the size of the top 3 biggest tables

./FMDeveloperTool --sortBySize database.fmp12 username password -quantity 3 -size_unit mb -verbose -exclude_container

After about 3 minutes, the results are output:

TableName TableSize Units
WorkerDate 1571 mb
MailBox 923 mb
Payroll 828 mb

Some of that was expected, but I was surprised to learn I was keeping over 900MB of sent email in the database.

  • To dig deeper, add the -target_tablename option with the name of the table, and instead of a list of tables, you get a list of fields from that table, sorted by size:
./FMDeveloperTool --sortBySize database.fmp12 username password -target_tablename Mailbox -quantity 3 -size_unit mb -verbose -exclude_container
FieldName FieldSize Units
BodyHTML 911 mb
BodyText 4 mb
BCC 1 mb

This shows me that nearly the entire 900+ MB of space is being taken up by one field, BodyHTML.

Looking into this further, I realized that I've got over 5 years of outgoing email in this table, and since we have many many backups for these emails, keeping that inside FileMaker is just taking up space.

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Very good! :+1:

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