INFORMIX programming help NEEDED

After much research, within my given limitations (such as proper reference, etc.) I would appreciate the help or advice from the net on the following issue: I have (or will have soon) an address/telephone number database. This database includes business associates as well as personal entries. Because of the activity I have on the phone, I have found it _exceedingly_ important to take notes during the phone calls; however, I've no really decent PAPER way to manage or organize these notes. So I had an idea... I would like to develop a take-notes-on-call function from within Informix, which would enable me to enter (at a variable length) notes on a given phone call, and perhaps cross-reference them if need be. (I have access to Informix-SE and ONLINE... ONLINE seems to be a lot of overhead, however) The concept I visualized was something like this: - For each note entry, there would be a 'header' (via another table or what have you) which would contain information such as who entered the note, the date and time, keywords (for cross ref?), and a SERIAL ref ID. - Each person/associate would have notes in their own separate file. - Each entry/note would be of a variable length. It was suggested that I use BLOBS for this. However, due to some of the (strange) limitations of BLOBS, I disagree. For one, you can't include them in an array, so that eliminates the crossref funtionality that i wanted. Being relatively unfamiliar with BLOBS, some of it sounded rather obtuse to me anyways. The only reason, that I can see, to use ONLINE would be for BLOBS. The other way I though of would be to have each entry/note be stored in its own file. The filename would contain certain identifying information that could be used by the program (ESQL-C?) to identify and find it. There could be a separate table for the corresponding headers... it sounds like a MESS! :) Has anyone experience with this sort of thing? Can someone help, or provide suggestions/examples of how to go about this effectively? The need for this is great... ie, I should have had this yesterday... One other thing I thought to do would be to include a digitized image in the database (for each entry) that would contain something like the business card, or even perhaps a photo of the person. This, I understand, could be accomplished with a graphic-BLOB (again, how I am unsure). Or I could hack in an external (yeck) program through ESQL-C. I hope I have provided enough information. If there are other questions about this, I will do my best to clarify things. Thanks in advance for any help. Forrest Aldrich