At GMD-IPSI over the past years the problem of managing SGML/HyTime, and recently XML, compliant documents have been investigated. Prototypes for managing structured documents within object-oriented and object-relational database management systems have been developed. In the course of this work approaches for the classical data management problems of modelling, declarative access and physical storage management have been reworked to account for the structural and behavioral properties of structured documents. We will discuss the object-oriented modelling of documents, declarative access and query optimization for document bases, and optimized storage schemes based on document fragmentation. These results are of increasing importance, since a substantial part of future information management will be document based. This fact is best reflected by the explosive development around the XML standard family within the WWW context.