This paper analyzes the impact of multimedia data on database management systems and proposes some solutions which allow for a high degree of integrated handling of multimedia data by a multimedia database system. We first give a characterization of multimedia data with respect to issues like time dependency and amount of data. Then we derive major requirements which need to be satisfied in order to provide the integration. These requirements include e.g., dynamic data management, non-transparent parallelism, scheduling, several kinds of abstractions, resource distribution transparency, and advanced interaction models satisfying real time constraints. We show how some of the requirements can be met by exploiting concepts from the object-oriented paradigm and database systems. Then we discuss extensions needed with respect to data integration, scheduling, parallelism, and real time streams.

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