Re: Why is VARCHAR2(4000) bad ?

Serge Rielau wrote:
> Walt wrote:
>> Harel wrote:

>>>...is there a VARCHAR2(*) ?
>>
>> Sort of. It's called a CLOB, and is the better way to deal with
>> arbitrarily long strings. Dealing with CLOBs can be a little tricky
>> since they're proprietary to Oracle and not standard SQL (i.e. you
>> can't expect to use them with ODBC etc.) I wouldn't use a CLOB for
>> this purpose.

> CLOBs are SQL Standard.

I stand corrected. CLOBS were not defined in the SQL-92 standard, but are defined in subsequent "standards".

 > The DBMS_LOB package (or whatever it is called) is not, of course.

That's the real point. Once you've defined the data as a CLOB, you have to interact with it, and you can't just treat it like a VARCHAR2 in your application code.

//Walt Received on Tue Jan 22 2008 - 09:52:44 CST