For anyone who cares, and apparently a lot of people did, FileMaker Inc., has reinstated DBF as an import/export format in FileMaker Pro 10. Thank you FileMaker Inc., for listening to your customers. Some cynics say they don't listen but I think this shows they do listen and that they do care what you think.

All you need to do is to visit the FileMaker Downloads page to get the FileMaker Pro 10.0v3 updater. The simplest way to do that is to select Downloads and Updates in your Help menu in FileMaker Pro.

The updater also fixes a myriad of other issues that users have found and reported. This includes an interesting issue where, on certain hardware, the Random function was not returning random values! FileMaker have also clarified exactly what it is that the Random function returns:
"The Random calculation [function] will generate values greater than 0 and less than 1. The value will never be 1."

The FileMaker Knowledgebase article (5464) now also needs to be updated

This is a recommended update for all FileMaker Pro 10 users.

Update on the Random function: I ran a looping script which created records with random numbers and let it run until nearly 5 million records were created.
Smallest random number was .000000043306499719619750977
Largest random number was .99999961769208312035.
FWIW, the file size was 310 MB.
It took a while to sort the records! But no zeroes or ones. Not 100% conclusive but good enough for me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 8:39 am and is filed under Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.