Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Multimedia Database Management
Systems
Michalis Vazirgiannis and Timos Sellis
8.1
Introduction
Recent advances in digital information technology; steady increases in ubiq-
uitous computing, CPU power, memory and disk capacity, and network
bandwidth; and the availability of new software and hardware for multime-
dia objects have increased the demand for multimedia applications. This is
evident by the rapid spread of multimedia into all fields of information proc-
essing, resulting in a need to access (store, retrieve, transport, display, etc.)
multimedia data in a flexible way. The growing interest in building multime-
dia applications is creating a need for developing multimedia database man-
agement systems (MM-DBMS) as tools for efficient organization, storage,
and retrieval of multimedia objects.
This chapter examines the special features of multimedia data that call
for special features in a DBMS to store and retrieve such information.
8.1.1
Diverse Nature of Media Objects
In traditional DBs, the vast majority of data are strings (e.g., names,
addresses) and numbers (e.g., salaries). Moreover, the DB values are merely
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