The Associated Press has been using FileMaker Pro from FileMaker Inc. to create some of its editorial databases for the past two years. Those databases, which often have to be put together in under two hours, are made available to all of the AP’s member news organizations.

The largest of the AP’s endeavors using FileMaker has been creating a database of the 2000 U.S. Census report, which it is continually updating as the Census report is updated.

The Associated Press’ FileMaker application in action. This screen shows 2000 Census data in the AP database.
Photo courtesy of the Associated Press

“We’ve put together demographic information for every town in the United States,” said Robert Weston, systems editor for the AP in New York. “We’ve gotten the data from the Commerce Department and Census Bureau and we used FileMaker because of the quick development time.”

The AP is also using FileMaker to publish the information to the Web, where it is available through member newspaper Web sites. Users can only access the wire through member Web sites.

“It’s set up so you can’t come directly to the wire without going through a member news site,” Weston said. “So, it sort of directs traffic to [the member newspapers’] local Web site in order to get to our content.”

The Associated Press is running a redundant array of independent computers and there are four or five of those computers running FileMaker, which hands data off to an Apache Web server.

The Census Report database has been one of the AP’s largest projects and Weston said at the peak of newspapers accessing to the 2000 Census report, the AP was getting about 380 queries per second.

The Associated Press is not using FileMaker for everything that is on the wire. FileMaker is used primarily for editorial databases.

“We don’t serve our entire Web site off of FileMaker. We’re actually using MySQL for that — but for editorial databases, where we get the data quick (we use FileMaker). We’re a news operation, so it’s not like a normal IT situation where you’re going to have six months to develop a database.”

Speed was the key factor in the AP’s decision to go with FileMaker. Weston said that although some of the other solutions the AP considered had some advantages over FileMaker, none of those were as fast.

“We looked at [Structured Query Language] Server and we looked at some other things, but for the amount of traffic that we were looking to handle and the actual time that it takes to develop, we just couldn’t beat it,” Weston said.

Weston writes templates for the editorial databases that can be used when he needs to create a database. Because of the work he does ahead of time, he can get information, put a database together and publish it to the Web in less than one hour from the time he gets the data.

“It has a fairly decent front end to it based on the amount of work that I did prior with the templates,” Weston said. “The bottom line is it’s just rapid deployment.”

The next project in the works for the Associated Press is putting together a uniform crime report. The development work for that database has been done using FileMaker, but Weston said he plans to eventually migrate the database over to MySQL.

Among the updates to the 2000 Census Report, the AP will add information including median property values and tax rates per town.

Weston said that the Census database is not getting the use it once did, but he hopes that will change as the information is updated.

“At one point there were a couple hundred newspapers linked to it. But as time goes by, less people were interested in the data,” he said. “I think that may change once we update it.”