What is a multimedia database (DBMS)?



Multimedia databases are the main source of interaction between users and multimedia elements.

Multimedia storage is characterised by the following −

  • Massive storage volumes.

  • Large object sizes.

  • Multiple related objects.

  • Temporal requirements for retrieval.

DBMS for Multimedia Systems

Multimedia applications are based on communications technologies, like electronic mail, the database system must be fully distributed.

A number of databases storage choices are as follows −

  • Extending the existing relational database management systems to support various objects for multimedia as binary objects.

  • Extending Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) beyond basic binary objects to the concepts of inheritance and classes.

  • RDBMSs support these features which provide extensions for object-programming front ends and/or C++ support.

Multimedia applications are used for converting to a full-fledged object-oriented database which supports the standard SQL language.

In addition to this, they are used for converting the database and application to an object-oriented database and using an object-enabled SQL for development.

These applications store data in the form of, text, images, graphic, animation, audio and video.

They include one or more primary media file types such as .txt for documents, .jpg for images, .mp3 for audio etc.

Multimedia Applications

It combines numerical and textual data, graphics from GUI front-ends,

CAD/CAM systems and GIS applications are the multimedia applications. Relational databases and the dominant database paradigm do not have that much ability to support the multimedia databases.

Key limitations of relational database systems for implementing multimedia applications stem from two areas: the relational data model and the relational computational model.

The multimedia database is pictorially represented as follows −


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