Does Oracle 8.04+ jdbc support BLOB's?

We are using 8.0.4 on AIX 4.3 and have had various JDBC connectivity (and other) problems.
We were using the JDBC OCI driver because it supported LONG data better than the Thin driver, but recently Oracle Support told us to switch to the thin driver.

We are trying to migrate from LONG to CLOB (and LONG RAW to BLOB) so that we can plan for partitioning support in 8i. Unfortunately, available information indicates that BLOB/CLOB support is only available with the JDBC OCI driver.

QUESTION: Does anyone have any experience that they would share using the BLOB/CLOB with Java / JDBC?
We are trying to find out how best to use BLOBS/CLOBS with Java. We don't need the thin driver, as the jdbc drivers are used only in the middle tier and do not need to be downloaded.

One would think that the OCI driver would perform better than the thin driver.

We are using jdk1.1.6 on AIX 4.3, and Oracle support tentatively told me we should use jdk1.1.4, but that may only be related to use of the OCI driver.

Any insights much appreciated.
Thanks,
Steve Tahmosh
State Street Corporation Received on Mon Jan 11 1999 - 14:32:03 CST