The wait is finally over, and the pundits and rumor-mills can silence themselves. FileMaker Pro 7 is a reality, and it's arguably the most significant update in FileMaker, Inc.'s history. In fact, it's one of the most significant software upgrades of the last couple years for any product.

FileMaker Pro 7 has managed to be both evolutionary and revolutionary. Although it's a brand-new application -- completely rewritten from scratch -- with dramatic changes and improvements on its back end, it's still the familiar and friendly product loved by developers and novices alike.

Let's start with a quick look at the vital statistics. FileMaker Pro 7 is a database, so how much data can it hold? File capacity has been increased by a factor of 4,000, to 8 terabytes. A single text field can hold up to 2 gigabytes. Container fields can hold items up to 4 gigabytes apiece, and they can be just about anything: not only pictures and sounds, but also Microsoft Office documents, PDF or Photoshop files, MP3, QuickTime, or other multimedia files. You can now import and export all these document types, giving FileMaker Pro 7 the potential to become the ultimate document management system for just about any conceivable application.

Number fields can store values ranging from 10^-400 to 10⁴⁰⁰, which are pretty big numbers, considering the number of elementary particles in the observable universe is only 10⁷⁸. FileMaker Pro 7's math functions are now powerful and precise enough to manage those numbers. There's also a new field type: Timestamp holds the date and time in a single field, a format that conforms to standards in many programming languages and simplifies time comparisons.

All this contributes to FileMaker Pro 7's requirement to use a new file format: .FP7, replacing .FP5. The .FP7 format requires you to upgrade your clients to FileMaker Pro 7, and your server to FileMaker Server 7. See this issue's Editor's View for a detailed description of the new FileMaker 7 product family.

As has every version of FileMaker Pro before it, FileMaker Pro 7 opens and converts existing FileMaker Pro documents from previous versions, and after they're converted, everything should work exactly as you're accustomed to (see Danny Mack's article on page 20 for a closer look at solution conversion). But I hope you don't stop there: The real reason to use FileMaker Pro 7 is you can create database solutions that do much more with much less work and overhead.