Virtual machine image (VMI) management has become one of the key infrastructure components in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud systems. Any “good” VMI management system should support flexible and efficient VMI services to cloud users, and offer scalable, easy-to-maintain and efficient VMI management for cloud providers. While there have been a number of systems and optimizations for VMI management, this paper investigates a declarative and data-centric approach to VMI management for both cloud users and providers. Specifically, by viewing VMI management as a data-intensive application, we propose Hemera, a novel VMI management system prototype based on relational database systems. Hemera adopts a data-centric approach to VMI management system design, where a VMI is modeled as structured data. With the data-centric approach, the key operations of VMI management can be recast naturally as programs based on SQL language. Moreover, Hemera embraces a series of automatic optimization opportunities with their root from databases. We have developed a system prototype based on MySQL. Our experimental results show the efficiency and feasibility of our declarative and data-centric approach to VMI Management.