As with too many programs of all types, features are added because they can be, without necessarily being of benefit to users. This might please a tiny percentage of power users, but there's always a much greater number of users for whom each new version brings another anxiety-filled learning experience for little or no apparent gain. Databases have been particularly guilty of this.
Few users understand the purpose or uses of relational storage and retrieval.
Flat-file databases took care of these users for a while, but the past year has seen the demise of most of these products as a wave of powerful relational products extended their reach down, from developers to end users. The result is a crop of relational databases that claim to be all things to all people. The packages in this review are some of the most powerful and feature-rich applications available for the desktop, offering everything from contact management and fully fledged application development to Web publishing. We set our usability testers the task of designing a small application for use by a magazine marketing department. They were given two files of, first, names and addresses and, second, product details, and asked to enable an end user to carry out a range of information-management tasks, such as looking up details of products advertised in a given issue of the magazine, or finding out which company and individual was responsible for placing the ad.