An old story. But with the latest Oracle jdbc drivers I may read CLOB data by simply calling getString(). No more 4K limit or anything else! Bad news is that Hibernate still doesn't like it and returns null. Does anybody know a good way to make Hibernate processing Oracle clobs transparently? Please don't send me to Hibernate 1.* howtos :-)

Never mind, I tried with 10g driver, disabled batching and changed type to text. Now it works like a charm.