Following such landmark aerodynamic tests as Irminger’s in 1894, Flachsbart’s in1932—the first to be conducted in boundary-layer flow—and University of Western Ontario(UWO) 1970s tests, considerable progress has been achieved in low-rise building design forwind. Nevertheless, the present state of the art remains inadequate. UWO tests wereconducted at low angular and spatial resolutions. Their results were then used to createdrastically simplifying standard aerodynamic tables and plots designed for slide-rule eracalculations and entailing errors that can exceed 50%.We review material which shows that significant improvements in main wind-load resistingsystem and component design can be achieved by using database-assisted design (DAD) andassociated structural reliability tools, thus accounting realistically for the complexity of thewind loading as well as for the stochasticity and knowledge uncertainties affecting wind effectscalculations. We illustrate DAD’s capability to obtain, for the first time in a wind engineeringcontext, realistic estimates of ultimate limit states due to local or global buckling failure. In thefuture other types of nonlinear behavior associated with ultimate limit states can be similarlydealt with. We note that DAD is ideally suited for use with data likely to be obtained in thefuture by Computational Fluid Dynamics methods. We discuss the need for assuring qualitycontrol procedures for wind tunnel testing so that inter-laboratory comparisons of test resultsand wind tunnel certifications can be conducted effectively. We also discuss the possibility of systematic database corrections based on full-scale test results, and the possibility of usingtests in non-standard wind environments and/or on buildings with non-standard shapes.