Multimedia Extensions for Relational Databases
Multimedia Extensions for Relational Databases

Summary/Abstract: Multimedia databases are systems capable of storing, manipulating and efficiently retrieving large amounts of both multimedia and alphanumeric data. A multimedia database should integrate at least three fundamental technologies: a conventional database management system (with all the capacities it offers), a hierarchical storage system (to store multimedia data on-, near- and off-line) and an information retrieval system (to support also content-based information retrieval). On the market there are a very few systems which are exclusively developed as multimedia databases. In most cases, applications that are typical for multimedia databases have been developed within already built systems, especially within relational and object-oriented databases. They are focusing on certain aspects (document-imaging, image or video administration), rather than being general-purpose applications. Relational and object-oriented systems have been extended with new capacities, extremely important in terms of an efficient manipulation of multimedia data: variable-length data types, hierarchical storage management, content retrieval capabilities and so on. This article aims to present and compare multimedia extensions for relational databases. An overview of the relational model makes the further understanding of various aspects easier.

• Details
• Contents