Multimedia Databases
A multimedia database is simply
a database that contains multimedia. Normally data types are mainly textual
or numeric, but in a multimedia database, actual multimedia can be stored in
a field in table.
The most common example of this
would be storing pictures in a database. A good example would be a club
membership database, which holds scanned pictures of its members. Pictures
of club members could then come up on the screen when staff look up a
certain members in the database, perhaps to confirm their identity.
Although this is the most common
thing to do with a multimedia database, a multimedia database can consist of
sound files & video clips as well as images.
If you store multimedia in a
database, the size of it can grow very quickly, as storing a simple picture
in a database takes up far more space than storing hundreds of names &
addresses. An alternative to this approach is to just store the full path &
filename of the picture. This keeps the database size small, but means that
if someone deletes, moves or renames one of the pictures that are linked to,
then that picture will be lost from the database.
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