Today's multimedia and hypermedia systems include such a huge amount of data and links, that they should be stored and maintained by a database system. Then a powerful and efficient database schema is needed. The Dexter hypertext reference model offers a widely accepted, powerful modelling technique for nodes and links. We present its stepwise conversion into a relational multimedia database schema. In the obtained hypermedia engine the most important and most time critical operation is the link navigation. We analyze its complexity in detail and optimize it by schema improvements. Finally we present an efficient implementation of the presented ideas: the System MultiMAP, developed at the TU Munich.