For 16 years now I’ve been working with 4D. I started in grad school with FileForce (a scaled down version of 4D v2) and have been with it ever since. In many ways 4D is an incredible tool - in terms of flexibility and capabilities it really shines. You can easily switch between single-user, client-server, Mac and Windows, all while having a built in web server and web services server.

Today 4D’s taken a big step forward with v11. For years now 4D’s Achilles heel was performance - especially with large datasets. 4D v11 has a rewritten database engine that’s a dramatic improvement. It’s also much more SQL-friendly. For over a decade you could use 4D as a client to SQL databases, and 4D could (sorta) be a SQL server for quite a while as well. With the release of v11 all of that changes and SQL is tightly integrated with 4D. But the good news is that they didn’t throw out what they already had - you can switch back and forth between SQL statements and 4D’s rather mature language as you see fit - within the same method.

This is also the first release of 4D that’s Intel native on the Mac. So that’s a welcome factor as well.

I look forward to working with v11 in the coming months and will post a number of observations here on the blog. I’ll also be attending 4D Summit next month and will blog the sessions I attend.

Tags: 4D, 4D-v11
Categories: 4D