Multimedia objects are large. Multimedia objects are complex in their structure. Multimedia documents are structured complex objects containing a number of these primitive objects. Multimedia objects have temporal and spatial relationships to each other in addition to the structural relationships described above. These relationships should be modeled explicitly as part of the stored data.
Multimedia applications require users to be able to define new data types as part of the schema.
This points to the need for extensible DBMSs. Furthermore, these applications add and delete new object types dynamically. Therefore, multimedia systems do not have static schemas and the data management system needs to be able to handle dynamic schema changes. User access to multimedia databases are complex and possibly ill-defined. This requires query models and languages that can deal with incomplete information and fuzzy specification.