Help with BLOBSPACES

hello out there, i am a rooky to informix and databases haven't really been my world up to now. since i want to store (and later retrieve) some images in an informix database, i am looking for a shortcut around the two feet of informix - on line documentation for a fast start. my questions are the following: 1. how can i access the database from within a c-program? 2. could someone give me an example on how to compile such a c-program? 3. how can i create, fill and access blobspace? 4. what are differences between blobspaces, dbspaces, chunks? 5. are there any books that might help me in getting some experience especially on administrating the database? PS: i had some experiences with a regular ingres-database some years ago (but not with blobspaces) on how to create and fill tables, how to start an sql query and how to define a view etc but administrating i totally new to me. our environment uses cooked files, so i don't have to take care on offsets. logging and mirroring are not necessary yet, since we first want to build a learning environment. thanks in advance for all kinds of hints (preferably by e-mail to: kieni@dfki.uni-kl.de since our news-server sometimes misses some articles) Thomas -- Thomas Kieninger DFKI-GmbH <Phone>: +49-631-205-3485 P.O. Box 2080 <Fax>: +49-631-205-3210 67608 Kaiserslautern <E-Mail>: kieni@dfki.uni-kl.de Germany <URL>: http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~kieni/cv.html