Reading/Writing BLOB fields

Hi all,

I've been struggling with this problem for some time, and thought the IB gurus here may be able to assist.

Basically, I have a table in an Interbase 6 database that contains two columns; table structure is below.

CREATE TABLE INBOXBLOB
(
  INBLOBKEY      VARCHAR(16) NOT NULL,
  INBLOB      BLOB SUB_TYPE 0 SEGMENT SIZE 80,
CONSTRAINT INBOXBLOBPK PRIMARY KEY (INBLOBKEY)
);

The INBLOBKEY column contains file names; these are referenced back to another table in the DB for identification purposes. The INBLOB column contains a TIFF image, which is programatically accessed from the application that uses this DB and displayed within the GUI.

What I want to do is write a script or app that will loop over all of the rows in the table and extract the data from the INBLOB column out to a file within the filesystem (with the filename from the INBLOBKEY column).

I'll then use a batch graphics conversion app to compress these TIFF's (I don't need any help with this step).

Once all the images have been a) dumped from the table and b) compressed, I then want to run a process of looping over the list of TIFF's within the filesystem, and inserting the image back into a new (clean) DB table, with the same structure as the original table.

I've got a solid programming history, and am comfortable with the filesystem-related aspects of this process. I also have a good experience with T-SQL, but what  I DON'T have much experience with is Interbase, specifically BLOB fields.

What I'm looking for is a code example of how to acheive the steps of:

a) exporting the blob fields from the DB to the filesystem
b) inserting the files from the filesystem back into a BLOB field within a table

As for the language, I'd be happy with VB, VBScript, JScript, PHP, ASP, or Perl... or <other>, if that's what you know.  I just want to make this happen :)  (I'm currently dealing with databases of 10-20GB in size, which are full of uncompressed TIFF's; If I can get the above process working, I'm looking at reducing those database sizes by around 90%!!!)

Cheers all...
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