Filemaker alternative

Model Organism: Worms
1

Dear Worm Community

Does anyone have suggestions for alternatives to Filemaker for maintaining a database of worm strains and plasmids?

Thanks
Roger

2

Hi Roger,

I have designed a rudimentary SQL database to store this type of data as a proof of concept when Sean Coakley started his lab. This would be a free, open source, robust and big tech agnostic way to solve this problem. To fully implement it one would need to also design some sort of user interface to it that could be hosted in an intranet of some sort, which I didn’t have time to do.

In this journey to try different solutions we used this service:

This allows a more user friendly way of creating
such database at a cost, all online with bells and whistles that filemaker pro doesn’t have.

We had an overall good experience with it, but ultimately our university pushed back on using it for “cybersecurity”/contractual reasons. You can ask Sean for his PI perspective of how all this went.

Another solution would be to use Microsoft’s “Filmmaker pro”, called Microsoft Access. But that comes with much the same problems that FileMaker pro has. Nevertheless and equally powerful and robust solution.

Happy to discuss more about our journey.

Hope that helps.

Cheers

3

Thanks Igor! I will look into it.

Cheers
Roger

4

I recently heard about “Grist” https://www.getgrist.com/. A spreadsheet/relational database combination. Spreadsheet for non-technical users but underneath there is a relational SQL database with multiple tables. Haven’t looked at it closely or have tried it out. Free if you you have 5000 “records” or a row in a spreadsheet.

1 Like
5

Thanks Ernstrom. This looks interesting.

6

Hi Roger,
You should follow the progress of Genestorian https://genestorian.org/
An Open Source web application for model organism plasmid and strain collections
developed by Manu Lera-Ramirez in Jürg Bähler’s group.
The first stage https://shareyourcloning.netlify.app/ is now in beta testing
Best,
Val