Attack of the BLOBs (and CLOBs and datalinks)

I've been able to successfully open, read, and update (with no changes to
BLOB or CLOB fields) files with BLOB, CLOB, datalink, and
user-defined-distinct fields from MI (although I get data mapping errors
on a BLOB in one test file that's got extra leading nulls to move it to a
16-byte boundary). I've even been able to change a datalink to a garbage
value that comes up "error" if I look at the file in SQuirreL (an apt name
for an SQL client if ever there was one!)

Does anybody know of a non-SQL way to resolve BLOBS and CLOBs? In the
buffer, they just come up as 32 bytes starting with a block of nulls,
followed by "*POINTER," followed by a block of EBCDIC spaces.

Does anybody know where the data mapping error I mentioned is coming from,
and how to get rid of it?

It was kind of nice yesterday, being able to do two impossible things
before lunch. ;-)

--
JHHL