Querying oracle clob column
Yes, it's not allowed (this restriction does not affect CLOB
s comparison in PL/SQL)to use comparison operators like =
, !=
, <>
and so on in SQL statements, when tryingto compare two CLOB
columns or CLOB
column and a character literal, like you do. To beable to do such comparison in SQL statements, dbms_lob.compare() function can be used.
select * from aTable where dbms_lob.compare(aClobColumn, 'value') = 0
In the above query, the 'value'
literal will be implicitly converted to the CLOB
data type. To avoid implicit conversion, the 'value'
literal can be explicitly converted to the CLOB
data type using TO_CLOB()
function and then pass in to the compare()
function:
select * from aTable where dbms_lob.compare(aClobColumn, to_clob('value')) = 0
Clob's are large datatypes that can store massive data and hence many operators that support varchar operations will not work on Clob, but in PL/SQL some of them do like mentioned here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B19306_01/appdev.102/b14249/adlob_sql_semantics.htm#g1016221
As you can see in the table Like
is supported in both Sql and pl/sql for clobs, but =
is not supported in SQL, but is in pl/sql
If you really need to you could convert to varchar in sql and compare like Tom Kyte mentions here like this: http://sqlfiddle.com/#!4/1878f6/1
select * from aTable where dbms_lob.substr( aClobColumn , length(aClobColumn), 1 )='value';