Introduction

Most potential owners of digital asset management systems will already own one or more databases. They are used by office systems for employee records and artists' contracts, and for the sales and traffic management of television commercials. Many media companies use databases to manage rights information. That is ownership of the intellectual property, and the logging of usage of that material. Another database application is the simple index systems for existing libraries of tapes and photographs.

These applications will have either to be closely integrated with, or replaced by, the digital asset management installation. In the former case, should they use the same database management system (DBMS). If you are already using a single database vendor, you will have staff trained and experienced in the maintenance of that product. It makes sense to stick with that vendor, unless there are compelling reasons to run different systems.

At the heart of every asset management system is a database. This is the repository of the metadata and may also be used to store small media files. For reasons of efficiency, the larger media files are stored in separate content servers and referenced by the metadata.

There are several possible architectures for a database:

• Flat file

• Hierarchical

• Network

• Relational

• Object oriented

• Extensible markup language (XML).

The basic table structure of the hierarchical database dates back to the days of mainframe computing. The first designs were static, in that the location of data records was known. This enabled the implementation of high-performance databases...