@bantu depends on the tradeoff. Code should be optimized for human readability when not loosing performance. Furthermore, when having to deal with `2^n` queries that cannot be handled with prepared statements there is something fundamentally wrong with the code. In this case I have been lamenting about CLOB columns for nearly half a year and used a fork without them to have oracle running at a customer. I'm glad I can now fallback to the to_char workaround, although we will have to measure the performance impact. But first, can we focus on making OC5 work on oracle - at all.