[horde] oci8, blobs and horde_prefs

[Liam Hoekenga]

> I'm not sure how I feel about that idea. I don't see any *obvious*
> drawbacks, but I'm guessing that for all but those few huge prefs, a varchar
> is a much better/more efficient/quicker way of storing the data.

True... VARCHAR is preferable, but it's not sufficient.   Oracle doesn't
have a column type that's
equivalent to MySQL and Postgres's TEXT that isn't a LOB (and that doesn't
appear to have changed from oracle8 to oracle9)..  VARCHAR2 is too short,
and while LONG's data definition seems sufficient, it's "provided for
backward compatibility" and runs into the same
4000 character string length constraint when you actually try to insert /
update data using PHP's oci8 calls (which I *think* is an issue with the
oracle library and not PHP itself.  I could be wrong).

We've run into this in IMP pretty much only with the filters and
identities preferences, but I'm sure you could come across this in other
applications.

Liam