# Re: Populating 'long' data column with Ruby OCI8 (trying aga

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-populating-long-data-column-with-ruby-oci8-trying-aga/95439>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [January 17, 2006, 10:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-populating-long-data-column-with-ruby-oci8-trying-aga/95439 "2006-01-17T22:08:29Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Gennady\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@Gennady\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Gennady_B)\
**Post date:** [January 17, 2006, 10:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-populating-long-data-column-with-ruby-oci8-trying-aga/95439/1 "2006-01-17T22:08:29Z")

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Thank you very much, Neil. I saw blob support in OCI8, however I need to  
work with datatype ‘long’. I need to for dealing with a legacy database  
that cannot be altered in any way. Will OCI8 work on ‘long’ columns? I  
will definitelly try, however I doubt it.

Thanks a lot anyways,  
Gennady.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Gennady\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@Gennady\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Gennady_B)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2006, 4:49am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-populating-long-data-column-with-ruby-oci8-trying-aga/95439/2 "2006-01-18T04:49:41Z")

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Sorry, saw “long”, thought “lob”.

The problem is that there’s a default buffer size for working with  
longs/lobs that you have to reset to a value that’s appropriate for your  
data.

In perl DBI there’s a LongReadLength attribute, and it looks like  
there’s  
something similar for oci8 via the “low level” interface (maybe  
OCI\_ATTR\_MAXDATA\_SIZE). But there doesn’t appear to be a way to set OCI  
attributes from the “high level” interface, unless I’m missing  
something.  
Which is likely…