Large blocks of text and special characters

[SteveCarrier]

I was just curious what the best data type to use if I have a large body of text(sometimes a whole page) that could be filled with special characters (such as semi-colons and commas). I thought about using varchar or a CLOB. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Steve Carrier

 

[karluk]

By far the most important consideration in choosing between varchar2 and clob is whether you expect to ever exceed the maximum size of varchar2, which is 4000 bytes in Oracle 8i. From your description of what you plan to do, I would guess that you could very well go over 4000 bytes, so clob looks like the best choice for you.