Help on merging chunks...

Hi, First I must admit that I know close to nothing about Informix, and I'm managing a network that's extrememly fragile. I'm doing everything I can to clean the entire network, but when it comes to Informix, I'm just no help at all. One of the problems we're having is with the no. of chunks, we are up to 7 chunks now, 2 root and 5 for data. Now I've learned from the TechSupport guys here in HK that I can only create up to 8 chunks (althou I couldn't find this mentioned in the manual). And, with a desperated need for more space in the database, I'm adding a new 1.2 Gbytes drive. But To expand the database I would have to add more chunks! Seems like the more chunks I add the slower the system becomes. Seems like it is time to merge back to a single chunk. I know I can export the data into readible text files (upload they call it?), and then create the new dataspace, then import the files back. But we can only afford one nite of downtime, and for more than 1 Gbytes of data, unloading alone on our weak NCR machine would have taken the entire nite. 1. What should I do??? 2. Is it true that you can only create up to 8 chunks (system-wide?) ? 3. Can a single program access data simultaneously from two dbspaces? 4. If I were to write two programs, one reading from the tables, and sending the data thru shared memory to another program that writes to another dbspace. Would that be much faster than unloading and loading the databases? Any help would much appreciated. Thanks! Best Regards, Samuelson Rehman SSR4 sam@nca.com,sam@hk.super.net