Today a reader mailed me about manipulating XMLType columns when the data is longer than the 4K limit that character-type handling imposes. My free book (see sidebar) has examples of how to do this using CLOB handling in PHP. I noticed that my xmlinsert.php example in the book does a SELECT and UPDATE, but never actually does an INSERT.

To correct the problem of the missing example he includes example code to connect to the database, push the XML into a bind variable and select the row back out to ensure everything's still structured correctly. You need to set up a new descriptor for the insert to work (CLOB).

LOB support was added to PDO_OCI in PHP 5.1. This is really cool, however, it appears that the LOB support really means BLOB support. After much investigation and self-doubt (e.g. "what if we're using streams incorrectly?"), we found out that PDO_OCI does not currently support CLOBs (BLOBs only!).

The bug's already been documented and remains open, but Maggie encourages all of the Oracle developers out there with the fact that Chris Jones (of Oracle) knows about the issue and plans to correct it in the next release of the extension.