Design and implementation of an object-relational multimedia database

An object-relational database infrastructure has been developed in our project, which could be used as a framework for new-generation multimedia databases. In this paper, we review the proposed infrastructure, and present our design and implementation of a prototype database system based on the infrastructure. The object-relational approach is adopted, as we believe it is capable of handling both simple and composite media objects, as well as managing complex relationships among these objects. Useful schema's have been developed in our prototype, which supports features such as authoring, editing, searching, navigating, browsing, and presenting. Our current implementation is based on the Oracle 7 and Video Server, and we plan to migrate the implementation to either Illustra, or Oracle 8, in the near future. That would enable us to further demonstrate some enhanced features of the proposed object-relational infrastructure, including complex data type management of, and query-oriented data access to, the multimedia data.