[horde] oracle and horde / imp

[Liam Hoekenga]

A few other Oracle users had posted their prefs database creation scripts - and 
they'd used CLOB instead of VARCHAR2, and it seemed to work on our test server.
So, we recently updated the column type of horde_pref's pref_value from 
VARCHAR2(4000) to CLOB, thinking that may be a better equivalent to MySQL's 
TEXT column type.  (We had a user complain that he couldn't update his mail 
filter rules, and it turns out his current ruleset is 4000 characters).

What we've found is that the PHP oracle stuff (realistically, probably the 
oracle client library) can do normal INSERTs / UPDATEs (and SELECTs?) on CLOB 
columns as long as the string being inserted is less than 4000 characters.  So, 
the switch from VARCHAR2 to CLOB didn't gain us a whole bunch.

I'm wondering, if other oracle users have run into this problem, and if so, how 
they've addressed it?


We don't want to rewrite the various horde module's SQL drivers to be more 
Oracle friendly (as we'd like to do as little localization as we have to).  It 
seems like it would be better to update PEAR to handle it, but that would 
require having PEAR disect the query seeing how long the strings being inserted 
where, and what kind of columns they were being inserted to.. which doesn't 
seem efficient or realistic.

I'm open to suggestions - we'd prefer not to switch database backends..

Liam