%0 Journal Article %T Multimedia and Standard Data Base Management Systems: Comparisons, Characteristics, Presents and Future Directions %A Bilal A. H. Abul-Huda %A Layla Jaafar %A Abdel Redha Mahmood %J Asian Journal of Information Technology %D 2012 %I %X This paper gives an informative comparative introduction between standard Data Base Management Systems (DBMSs) and Multi Media (MM) DBMSs (MMDBMSs). It discusses in more concentration and detail MM Data (MMD), MM Databases (MMDBs), MM Systems (MMSs), MM Data Stores (MMDSs), and MMDBMS. Characteristics of a real MMDBMS are given and then talks extended to MM data types (MMDTs) supported with various bit-storage gray-scale and color images, digital camcoders, audio, text, query in MMDBMS, types of MMD queries with examples from previous research works. State of the art in MMDBMS is discussed supported with up-to-date systems, such as News-on-Demand and the UCLA Knowledge-Based Multimedia Medical Distributed Database (KMeD) projects. Future vision of authors about MMDMs requirements and demands are outlined for future enhancements. %U http://www.medwellonline.net/abstract/?doi=ajit.2004.1123.1131