Over the last five to six years everybody has been talking about multimedia computing and how multimedia computing would change our ways of doing business and of running our every day life. In all the excitement around multimedia and the rapid creation of early products a more systematic investigation and development has been left to find. However, more recently companies, developers, and researchers have come about and realize now that a more systematic approach to multimedia in the long run will be beneficial to everybody. Using some typical application scenarios we will investigate the functionality required in multimedia databases and illustrate that "simple" extensions of relational databases are not the answer but that more advanced systems, incorporating concepts of object-oriented or active databases as well as handling functionality for (new) multimedia data types, are needed. We discuss the characteristics of multimedia data and observations with respect to requirements for multimedia database systems. Then, general conclusions from the characteristics and observations with respect to the functional building blocks of a multimedia database system are drawn. Based on a reference architecture we discuss individual extensions of database technology required for multimedia database systems.

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