LOBS or not ?

Hi,

For some Webapplication articels are stored in an Oracle DB. They sometimes can exceed the normal varchar column size of 4000 chars. Up today they're just stored in multiple 4000 char-sized columns. So, in PHP, its quiet easy to select an article by doing 'SELECT * from Article WHERE id = 100' and then concatenating the columns in the right order.

Is there any advantage of using LOB's here ? Using LOB's from a programmatically view needs some overhead to get dealt with.

thanks,

• Markus