How to display permalinks directly from Database

Hi all,

I am trying to read blog post directly from the database & I want to be able to display the result including all the links. I us the get_permalink function when adding links to posts and now I’m reading directly from the database this is causing me problems when I display the database result using echo. How do I get round this. Essentially what I am looking to do is display the last 5 posts on a page, where the latest post will be displayed completely and the following 4 will display title and a the first 300 chars or so. If anyone can help me out in any way that would be much appreciated.

Thanks.