LOBs are short hand for C(haracter)L(arge)OB(jects) or B(inary)L(arge)OB(jects)
Those are similar to (CLOB) a memo field or (BLOB)general field in VFP.
The CLOB is mostly for very ,large text documents, the BLOB for such stuff as AVI, MP3, etc. processing BLOBs requires special codeing though. For binary data, i.e. JPG, MP3, other OLE fileds a LONGRAW works better.
From my experience, the ODBC drivers for Oracle from MS work, but not as well as the drivers provided by Oracle. This is especialy true if you are working in Java, the oracle flavor of JDBC is the only one that truly works on an Oracle DB.