long raw

Hi,
I have a long raw datatype - it's essentially a lob - xml message - don't ask why it's not stored as a lob.
We're looking at doing some manipulation of this data with a procedural language, but I'd like to try and do it using PL/SQL - simply reading and extracting some values based on xml tags. Nothing too complex - but there is a lot of logic to capture.

My rationale for doing it within the DBMS is that it should be quicker than reading it into an external language (with associated object overhead).

We're using Oracle 8i, and the UTL_RAW package does not seem to be a huge help. While I can substring the values, it looks like it might be in hex(?) and I'm trying to work out how to get it into usable intelligible VARCHARs. the convert to varchar2 function does not seem to do this.

We can get some results by converting to a LOB, but this seems to require conversion into a table (rather than on the fly casting/conversion within PL/SQL and with some 20000 values the overhead means too much processing time.

Any suggestions would be most gratefully appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Maxx Received on Fri May 17 2002 - 07:06:17 CDT