Sensor networks are integration of sensor techniques, nested computation techniques, distributed computation techniques and wireless communication techniques. They can be used for testing, sensing, collecting and processing information of monitored objects and transferring the processed information to users. Sensor network is a new research area of computer science and technology and has a wide application future. Both academia and industries are very interested in it. The concepts and characteristics of the sensor networks and the data in the networks are introduced, and the issues of the sensor networks and the data management of sensor networks are discussed. The advance of the research on sensor networks and the data management of sensor networks are also presented.