Re: Filemaker Pro & Perl

[Arguile]

The 30 day trial version should buy you some time.

Filemaker does actually have an ODBC capability, but I believe it has to be running as a daemon unlike others of it's ilk (read: M$ Access). If you're in *nix you could run it under Win4lin or VMWare and use an ODBC bridge to connect to it for the time being.

That said, virtualsue is right on the mark; getting their data into a more managable format is a very good idea. Even if you have to do some form of XML replication and parsing between their version and (I'm assuming) the web/intranet version you're developing, it's often worth the price for a well normalised database and good DBMS engine (though not always).

The DBI module is quickly becoming a favourite of mine. I was amazed at the level they took DBD::CSV too, very nice for quick work. If it's mainly content pull MySQL is a nice light-weight uberfast engine. Up a few steps is PostgreSQL if you need things like row level locking*, foreign key relations/contraints, sub selects, transactions**, stored procedures, et al. I'm assuming the $$$ DBMSs like Oracle are out of the question.

I had to revise this a few times, I'm a DBA and such products as "Filemaker" incite less than complimentary remarks from me normally. ;)

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* Coming in MySQL 4
** MySQL's isn't nearly as robust, though it is there for a specific table type