First, let me say that I'm well aware of http://www.hibernate.org/56.html (for Oracle 9i) and http://www.hibernate.org/76.html (nullSafeSet() does not work), but neither of these approaches seem to work with Oracle 8i. Oracle does not seem to be too thrilled with the single transaction oriented setClob, passing in a Hibernate.createClob(). Oracle wants you to first insert an empty_lob() as a locator, commit, and then obtain a reference via a select, to which you may direct your output stream. Therefore, you must do something like register a Synchronization with the transaction, and implement the CLOB/BLOB select and output stream write in the afterCompletion() callback. However, this assumes that you have some notion of a unique reference to the data you just inserted into the database, and that you could somehow obtain a reference to the transaction instance from inside a UserType impl.

I'm at a loss here. Can somebody throw me a bone? Am I heading down the wrong path?

Cheers.
Steve Maring
Tampa, FL