And, every application can access different remote databases on the network. The location independence or called transparency, however, is not supported, that is, applications need to specify the location path. The architecture gives the advantages of efficient data processing and better data accessibility. The wide and various software and hardware platforms give the problems of compatibility, communication, and conversion.
Current practice is to use the middleware services to connect and convert heterogenous systems.
Each client site can have its own application platform. Through the gateway manager, the client accesses the backend database servers on different platforms. The gateway or router translates the data requests and passes them to the driver which in turn calls the services of the server to process the requests. When the job is finished, the server returns the results to the client through the gateway manager. A multimedia database is a database which consists of arbitrary data types and data sources.