Abstract: This paper analyses the characters of multimedia applications, and expounds the twelve requirements. For multimedia DBMS, these requirements can be classified into three categories: the first category is the so-called standard DBMS requirements,the second one is the requirements for multimedia object modeling, and the last one is the specific funtional requirements of multimedia application. So far, there are no clearcut definitions of MDBMS. In fact, this paper gives one coarse definition for MDBMS.