A Multimedia Database Management System (MMDBMS) must support multimedia data types in addition to providing facilities for traditional DBMS functions like database creation, data modeling, data retrieval, data access and organization, and data independence. The area and applications have experienced tremendous growth. Especially with the rapid development of network technology, multimedia database system gets more tremendous development and multimedia information exchange becomes very important.
A multimedia database is a database that hosts one or more primary media file types such as .txt (documents), .jpg (images), .swf (videos), .mp3 (audio), etc. And loosely fall into three main categories:
1) Static media (time-independent, i.e. images and handwriting).
2) Dynamic media (time-dependent, i.e. video and sound bytes).
3) Dimensional media (i.e. 3D games or computer-aided drafting programs- CAD)
All primary media files are stored in binary strings of zeros and ones, and are encoded according to file type.
The term "data" is typically referenced from the computer point of view, whereas the term "multimedia" is referenced from the user point of view.
