In today’s digital era, it is very easy to copy, manipulate and distribute multimedia data over an open channel. Copyright protection, content authentication, identity theft, and ownership identification have become challenging issues for content owners/distributors. Off late data hiding methods have gained prominence in areas such as medical/healthcare, e-voting systems, military, communication, remote education, media file archiving, insurance companies, etc. Digital watermarking is one of the burning research areas to address these issues. In this survey, we present various aspects of watermarking. In addition, various classification of watermarking is presented. Here various state-of-the-art of multimedia and database watermarking is discussed. With this survey, researchers will be able to implement efficient watermarking techniques for the security of multimedia and database.