Active, real-time database systems (ARTDBs) have attracted the attention of researchers in recent times. Such systems are envisioned as control systems for environments as diverse as process control, network management and automated financial trading. Sensors distributed throughout the system report the state of the system to the database. Unacceptable state reports typically results in corrective actions being triggered with deadlines. Thus ARTDBs incorporate both real-time as well as active characteristics. In this paper we study buffer management in ARTDBs and propose some principles that should govern such policies. Buffer management is recognized as not being a well studied area in active, real-time systems. As a result of our work, we postulate a new buffer management scheme that relies on two strategies: prefetching and priority-based buffer allocation and replacement. Subsequently, we report the result of studies of the performance of our proposed policy.