16 MULTIMEDIA

This chapter introduces the characteristics of multimedia and then goes on to address two approaches to handling multimedia with databases: storing the multimedia outside the database and providing a reference to the multimedia, and storing the multimedia within the database. There is also brief mention of special packages for multimedia.

WHAT IS MULTIMEDIA?

When we have discussed data so far we have generally been referring to structured data – that is, data that comprises short character strings (names, job titles, etc.), numbers and dates. Not all data is structured, however. There is another category of data that is sometimes called ‘multimedia data’ and sometimes called ‘unstructured data’. This data includes line figures ...

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