Oracle 10g XE and CLOB data type

Question

I am using Oracle 10.2.0.1.0 Express Edition and I wish to store large amounts of data in a CLOB column. I have created my table using a "standard" SQL statement similar to the following:
CREATE TABLE LotsofData(
id INT NOT NULL,
data CLOB);
The table is created successfully, so far so good.
And I used a "standard" insert SQL statement to insert large amount of data into the before mentioned table, similar to the follwing:
INSERT INTO LotsofData VALUES('4043', 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog <insert more iterations>');
The data being inserted takes up 4043 bytes. Now when attempting, using among other programs the handy web interface, to execute the insert statement I get this error:
Error starting at line 1 in command:
INSERT INTO LotsofData VALUES('4043', 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog <insert more iterations>');
Error at Command Line:1 Column:38
Error report:
SQL Error: ORA-01704: string literal too long
Now if I reduce the size of the data to be inserted to 4000 bytes or below there is no problem. I have performed searches on google groups, google search engine, the oracle site, this forum but not found a way to solve it... I have found documentation stating that there is support for 4gb of user data, but well that doesn't really help.
I have been on the trail of TABLESPACE and working with that, but with no luck. The data type BFILE will not work as I need to be able to change the data after it has been inserted into the table.
Is the 4000 bytes a limitation in the Express Edition and I should just forget it, or is there a way I configure the database to accept large amounts of data. Should I be creating the table using a different SQL statement?
kind regards
Chris Nilsson

Answer 1

Right... I found out how you can solve this, well not through the web interface... but oh well it is possible though...
the error I was getting was: ORA-01704:     string literal too long.
the keyword/phrase is "bind variables"... Did a little more searching and found this site:
http://www.akadia.com/services/ora_bind_variables.html
So basically you use bind variables to insert data which fills more than 4000 bytes...
Since the data I will be inserting will be inserted via Java/.NET application I found the section called "Bind Variables in VB, Java and other applications" the most interesting... During my testing and I had neglected to use PreparedStatements in Java, and according to the site, using PreparedStatement provided an easier solution as the API does most of the work for you. My solution was to create a small program which read the large amounts of data from a file then feed this to a PreparedStatement, setObject or setASCIIStream/setCharacterStream, then execute it.
Well I hope this helps other people who get the same error code.