With the aid of a user-defined primary access method, you can use a SELECT statement to access
any of the following data as though the data that is in the HCL Informix® relational table:
Legacy data such as flat-file records
Mixed binary and text data such as a word-processor document
Multiple-vendor data across the enterprise
Mobile device feeds
Internet and intranet application streams
Nonrelational data, such as hierarchically structured Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents
The user can use SQL to access both Informix data and virtual
table data. A virtual table requires a user-defined access
method to make the data in the table accessible to Informix. In the following
figure, a single application processes Informix data and virtual
data in an external location and smart-large-object storage.Figure 1: Using a primary access
method