Multimedia Transaction Management

Current database management system techniques are insuucient to support the management of multimedia data owing to their time-sampled nature. The extension of database systems to support multimedia applications thus requires new mechanisms to ensure the synchronized presentation of multimedia data streams. In order to exibly and eeciently present multimedia data streams to users, media streams must be segmented into media objects with time constraints among these objects speciied and maintained. In this paper, we investigate a framework and systematic strategies for supporting the continuous and synchronized retrieval and presentation of multimedia data streams in a multimedia database system. Speciically, we will develop: (1) a practical framework for specifying multimedia transactions and schedules and the appropriate synchronization constraints between diierent media streams; (2) multimedia transaction scheduling principles underlying the synchronized presentation of multimedia data streams when delay eeects are considered; and (3) pragmatic techniques for multimedia transaction scheduling to support the synchronized presentation of multimedia data streams in object-oriented database systems.