Databases are increasingly being used to store multi-media objects such as maps, images, audio and video. Storage and retrieval of these objects is accomplished using multi-dimensional index structures such as R¢ -trees and SS-trees. As dimensionality increases, query performance in these index structures degrades. This phenomenon, generally referred to as the dimensionality curse, can be circumvented by reducing the dimensionality of the data. Such a reduction is however accompanied by a loss of precision of query results. Current techniques such as QBIC use SVD transform-based dimensionality reduction to ensure high query precision. The drawback of this approach is that SVD is expensive to compute, and therefore not readily applicable to dynamic databases. In this paper, we propose novel techniques for performing SVD-based dimensionality reduction in dynamic databases. When the data distribution changes considerably so as to degrade query precision, we recompute the SVD transform a...