Sorting text and LONG datatypes.

Hi,

I'm running Oracle 7.3 and these LONG datatypes are so restrictive! I can't use a LONG datatype with an ORDER BY, so does anyone know of an efficient work around to achieve a sorted rowset on text contained in a column of LONG datatype?

I've got large database tables and text strings which can be > 2000 characters are stored in a LONG column in one of these tables. Currently the way I get a rowset sorted by this text is to create another table with a VARCHAR2 datatype and then in PL/SQL populate this table with truncated versions of the text strings from my other table and then use these for a sort. However, I am not impressed with the speed of this solution and I feel there must be a better way of doing it.

Robbo Received on Sun Jan 17 1999 - 09:22:00 CST