Working on a Coldfusion app with Oracle database, I wanted to import large amounts of data into “CLOB” fields (capable of handing GBs of data). I tried using SQL Developer (by Oracle) and another user tried SQL Loader, but we were both getting the same error on the INSERT statement:

ORA-01704: string literal too long
Cause: The string literal is longer than 4000 characters.
Action: Use a string literal of at most 4000 characters. Longer values may only be entered using bind variables.

We searched online and noticed that the fix to this problem required bind variables and/or creating a procedure, etc. Really a roadblock if you’re not familiar with PL/SQL and Oracle.

But the problem could be solved using Coldfusion’s JDBC connector to Oracle. I simply wrote up the following cfml code, and noticed that the cfsqltype=”cf_sql_clob” takes care of this 4000 (4k) chars limit problem.

Code:

<cfquery datasource="dsn" username="user" password="pass">
	INSERT INTO logs_table VALUES (
		1,
		<cfqueryparam value="TEST" cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar">,
		<cfqueryparam value="HUGE AMOUNT OF TEXT HERE (use cfsavecontent and output here)" cfsqltype="cf_sql_clob">
	)
</cfquery>