The ideas presented in this paper have arisen during the work on a database system designed for the description and comparison of human languages in a theoretically well-founded and systematic way. The Cross-linguistic Reference Grammar (CRG) is a database application for unified descriptions of natural languages of any kind, including sign languages, that has been developed over the last decade at LMU Munich. The core of the application is an XML-based client-server-DBMS called Systematics (Nickles 2001) that implements a class system of linguistic phenomena as a kind of Be-Have-tree (Peterson 2002). Examples are uniformly coded in one of the interlinear representation formats provided by CRG for three ontological categories and modalities of linguistic signs: spoken, signed, and written (Zaefferer 2003). The present paper is about one of the criteria of adequacy that has informed CRG system design from the beginning. I call it pro-competitivess and by a pro-competive database I understand a database that is designed to include dissenting entries or competing descriptions, i.e., entries that share a common basic datum to be described, but disgree on the way it is described or categorized. This is to be contrasted with apodictic databases, where no basic datum can possibly be assigned more than one category or description.