With the Perl DBI interface, you had to set some magic item on the statement or database handle--LongReadLen, maybe--in order to get all of a LONG or LOB. But y

With the Perl DBI interface, you had to set some magic item on the statement or database handle--LongReadLen, maybe--in order to get all of a LONG or LOB. But you could get the whole thing. I mention Perl here, because I used it to copy articles from the Oracle back end of a ColdFusion website to the front end of something built on PHP plus MySql. And before I could even test this, I had to get the data into a different Oracle database, using the standard exp/imp. I don't doubt what you say, but I do wonder about the experts you encountered.