16 MULTIMEDIA

This chapter introduces the characteristics of multimedia and then goes on to address two approaches for 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 a brief mention of special packages for multimedia.

WHAT IS MULTIMEDIA?

When we have discussed data so far we have generally been referring to data that comprises short character strings (names and so on), numbers and dates. This is often called structured data. 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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