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