Large text strings and CLOBS

Does anyone know if there has been a special prize going round internally in Oracle for the last few years to devise the most bizarre, complex and restrictive ways of dealing with large text strings in the RDBMS and toolset?

We have VARCHAR2 which inexplicably has different size limitations in PL/SQL and the RDBMS (oh, thanks for the increase to 4000 in Oracle8, very generous).

We have LONG which is 2Gb in the RDBMS, 32K-ish in PL/SQL and unsupported in SQL*Plus; and are virtually impossible to use in any sensible way.

We have VARCHAR2S developed for the DBMS_SQL package, allowing > 32K SQL to be parsed.

Now we have CLOB which have their own limited access packages, have to be stored in a table, etc. and must always be treated specially.

Why, on earth, can't we just have VARCHAR2 of user-definable max length
(init.ora let's say), all manipulated through standard functions
(SUBSTR, REPLACE, etc), with fancy packages to chop them up for
efficient processing in client-server environments as an option.

Does life REALLY have to be made this difficult?

Andy Received on Mon Jul 12 1999 - 07:55:29 CDT