The driver allows you to retrieve and update long data, specifically LONGVARCHAR 1 data, using JDBC methods designed for Clobs. When using these methods to update long data as Clobs, the updates are made to the local copy of the data contained in the Clob object.
Retrieving and updating long data using JDBC methods designed for Clobs provides some of the same benefits as retrieving and updating Clobs, such as:
Provides random access to data
Allows searching for patterns in the data, such as retrieving long data that begins with a specific character string
To provide these benefits, data must be cached. Because data is cached, your application will incur a performance penalty, particularly if data is read once sequentially. This performance penalty can be severe if the size of the long data is larger than available memory.
1 You may determine whether Character varying columns are described as VARCHAR or LONGVARCHAR by setting the VarcharClobThreshold connection property.
Provides random access to data