Yong, It might be true that you should avoid LOBs for smaller-than-~4K character strings prior to 11g, but SecureFiles LOBs in 11g is designed to solve those performance issues. Have you seen similar issues with SecureFiles LOBs in 11g? -KJ *Kevin Jernigan* (650) 607-0392 (o) *Senior Director Product Management* (415) 710-8828 (m) kevin.jernigan@xxxxxxxxxx <mailto:kevin.jernigan@xxxxxxxxxx> *Advanced Compression - ACO*: *Information Lifecycle Management* - ILM Advanced Row Compression *Temporal database* (Total Recall etc) Advanced LOB Compression *SecureFiles* Advanced LOB Deduplication *Database File System* - DBFS RMAN Backup Compression *Direct NFS Client* - dNFS Data Pump Export Compression *CloneDB* Data Guard Redo Network Transport Compression *Database Resource Manager* - DBRM Flashback Data Archive History Table Optimization *Continuous Query Notification* - CQN *Hybrid Columnar Compression* - HCC *Index Organized Tables* - IOT *Database Smart Flash Cache* *OISP* On 5/1/2013 8:43 AM, Yong Huang wrote: >> Doing a test, converting the column to a char compared to an SQL >> statement leaving it as a LOB, it completes very quickly as all the >> special handling for a LOB, fetching it, etc, is no longer needed. > I always tell the developers to avoid CLOB unless they know for sure the text > will exceed 4000 characters. Most of them simply consider LOB to be longer > varchar2, not knowing that there's quite a bit of difference between the > mechanism to handle varchar2 and that to handle LOB (which is generally less > efficient, and possibly over-engineered). > >> the front end limits the [LOB comments] field to 255 characters > That's even worse in the design. > > Yong Huang > -- > //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l