Affordable and mainstream manipulation of multimedia data types will lead to tremendous growth in imaging and multimedia data in general computing environments. Multimedia and imaging applications can now provide benefits to common business applications by integrating voice, sound, images, animation and digitized video. Ultimately, it will be possible to convert all information that is currently stored on paper, video and film into a digitized environment. This will allow users to organize, search and route multimedia objects over local and wide area networks in real time. The authors' introductory level presentation of this new class of data types supplies the database technology required for effective manipulation and storage. Multimedia and database experts, Khoshafian and Baker aptly illustrate the ability of multimedia database systems to concurrently share, access, and query large collections of multimedia information. They introduce the elemental concepts of object and relational databases and then apply them to multimedia and imaging databases. Fundamental database topics discussed include querying, transaction support, recovery, security, and storage. This book provides information essential to the incorporation of multimedia databases that will improve the quantity and quality of information manipulated by computer users in many areas including medicine, computer aided design, and information retrieval systems.