In a recent opinion poll of telecommunications executives, enterprise network management was identified to be the top technological issue of the future. At present, however, there do not exist any viable solutions to this critical problem. Therefore, considerable research efforts are being focused on the development of effective network management tools. A management information database is the heart of a network management system - it provides the interface between all functions of the network management system, and therefore has to provide sophisticated functionality allied with high performance. In this paper, we describe MANDATE (MAnaging Networks using DAtabase TEchnology), a database system that is designed to effectively support the management of large networks of the future. MANDATE uses special characteristics of network management data and transactions, together with recent advances in database technology, to efficiently derive its functionality.