With several years of multibeam surveying experience the Royal Danish Administration of Navigation and Hydrography (RDANH) recognized the storage and administration of the vast volume of bathymetric data as the main challenges and a potential "showstopper" for the spread of this surveying method. In the spring of 1998 RDANH initiated a project with Informi GIS and Esri on the development of a depth database. An SDE-based prototype was developed and tested with the load of approximately 500M sounding points. The depth database provides the core functionality for storage and retrieval of bathymetric data and is perceived as the server for a suite of client applications. The full version of the depth database is scheduled to go into production beginning of 1999.