What language are you using for your INSERT? The longest VARCHAR2 field is 4000, but LONGs should give you 2GB, and CLOBs even longer. However, certain development tools don't truly support LONGs and CLOBs, they just treat them as VARCHAR2. Other tools, like Web PL/SQL are limited by the size of a PL/SQL VARCHAR2, which is 32760, and is the largest argument that you can pass to a procedure. Which is fine, because as far as I can determine, an HTML form can't handle a TEXTAREA bigger than that anyway.