While this is good news for those who love having computer rooms full of massive computing power, all those folks buying Pentiums and putting them on desktops, will be doing little to tap the horsepower they have at their disposal. Now let's move our focus to that of the standards based clients. They are functionally rich because this kind of product can support simultaneous searching of multiple databases. This is a very valuable feature in that it greatly compresses the amount of time required to sequentially query multiple databases. Support of virtual union catalogs is possible, removing the need to duplicate data to create union catalogs.
Search filtering on the client PC is also possible.
Configurations must be carefully managed and if done improperly can result in very difficult to diagnose problems for those who are supporting. Because of the inherent nature of the design, much of what happens is under the control of the server. These types of products typically require fairly new and powerful systems upon which to run. Most require at least a 486 with 8 Mb of memory and a fair amount of disk. Of course, we all know, what you have in the field does not always come up to that level.