Fortunately, the last several years have seen the release of phonetic/phonological databases that are much richer and have better coverage, such as Phoible 1 (Moran et al., 2014) and the dataset accompanying a recent comparison of phonological and genetics patterns of diversity (Creanza et al., 2015) curated by Merritt Ruhlen 2 .
such segment-level databases have a major drawback intrinsic to their design in that they cannot be directly used for analyses that require generalizations over classes of segments that share theoretically interesting features, such as "front rounded vowels", "retroflex stops" or "clicks".