If you received Filemaker Pro as a download from the Filemaker Retail website, you received an e-mail containing your personal information and a link to the download page for your software. Use the information contained on this page for ordering your Filemaker Pro software. The e-mail sent with the download contains a Windows Installer (.exe) file which you will need to save the file to your desktop. At this point, it is not possible to run the Filemaker application as you would normally.
Several years ago, Filemaker Pro was released with the upgrade to Windows Vista. At this time, the program incorporated a new technology known as Windows Server 2021 R2 which made it necessary for the program to update in order to run correctly with this newer operating system. Consequently, a new file format was introduced called SQL stored procedures which made it possible for you to create stored procedures as well as custom programming for your application in previous versions of Filemaker. This feature was originally implemented as part of the Microsoft SQL database language service (MS SQL Server).
However, SQL stored procedures are not supported by all SQL databases built by Microsoft. In this case, another popular database management system (RDBMS) was developed by Microsoft called Crystal Reports. The SQL database built by Microsoft is supported by several popular programming languages including C++, Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby. Filemaker Pro software was also released in other languages including HTML, Perl, Python, and JavaScript. For those who may be using a non-Microsoft Windows computer, this does not mean that you cannot develop your application using the Filemaker Pro software. Since the Filemaker Pro software was released as a download, it was based on a version of the older MS SQL Server database software which is supported on Windows operating systems.