How to find out the length of a LONG column?

Question

How can I find out the length of a LONG column, I should write a stored procedure which will return me the length of a LONG column passed as an argument to it!
any ideas or suggestions? please respond, i need this urgently, or you can mail me at [email protected]
thanks,
srini

Answer 1

Actually a LONG variable in PL/SQL maxes out at 32K, so this would not be accruate. If you are running Oracle 8+, you could do a conversion to LOB which will give you an accurate length. Note, this example needs a table created to hold the converted lob value, you can't do it directly in pl/sql:
create table lobhold
(templob clob);
declare
mylength number;
begin
execute immediate 'insert into lobhold select to_lob(text) from equipment_notes where equipment_id=1448';
select dbms_lob.getlength(templob) into mylength
from templob;
dbms_output.put_line(mylength);
execute immediate 'truncate table lobhold';
end;