I wound up fixing my CLOB problem by making some compromises and doing a bit of RTFM. I’m still bitter about the way CLOBs work (although as a reader points out, they really aren’t worse than LONGs), but at least I’ve been able to move past that by solving the problem. And, in fairness to Oracle, CLOBs may very well be the way they are because of some technical issue on one of the myriad platforms that Oracle runs on. Somebody working there is probably cursing about the compromises they had to make to implement large database fields in their database.