>The benefit of CLOB is you can do a "string search" using SQL's LIKE operator in addition to exact matches. You can not do that on a LONG data type. You can not create an index on either data type. The other factor is you can not use the Microsoft ODBC for Oracle as it has not been updated to handle the newer Oracle data types. You will have to use Oracle's ODBC driver or a 3rd party driver. You can not use NVL, but you can SUBSTR(). Go figure.

Mark,

I dropped a table I had with a LONG field. I executed the script to re-build it with a CLOB field instead. After re-installing the data I was still not able to use SUBSTR()

SELECT SUBSTR(ADDR_DTL.ADDR_LINE, 1, 30) AS ADDR_LINE1, SUBSTR(ADDR_DTL.ADDR_LINE, 31, 60) AS ADDR_LINE2 FROM ADDR_DTL WHERE ADDR_DTL.ADDR_NO = 4311

Am I miss-using SUBSTR()

Mike