my recent reads..

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters; From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima
Power Sources and Supplies: World Class Designs
Red Storm Rising
Locked On
Analog Circuits Cookbook
The Teeth Of The Tiger
Sharpe's Gold
Without Remorse
Practical Oscillator Handbook
Red Rabbit

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Generating CLOB/CDATA elements with XMLDB

Generating CDATA elements with Oracle XMLDB recently got a good airing in the XMLDB forums.

I won't reiterate the discussion there, but offer a summary and some sources.

It seems the current state of affairs is that if you need to generate large text elements with XMLDB you have two options:


  • use DBMS_LOB procedural code to manually construct a CDATA element, or
  • use XMLTYPE views to construct an XML-encoded element


In both cases you need to be careful not to do anything that casts or converts to varchar to avoid the inherent size limitations.

Note that the XML-encoding in XMLTYPE views is automatic, and I currently don't know how to tell it not to encode but rather quote as CDATA.

Some sources and examples:


  • clob-cdata.pl is a Perl script using DBI that demonstrates how to generate an XMLTYPE view over an arbitrary CLOB element, without using XMLSchema. In this case, the CLOB will be automatically XML-encoded [clob-cdata-nonschema.sql is just the plain SQL].
  • clob-cdata-schema.sql shows how you can do a similar thing, but using an XMLSchema definition.
  • clob-cdata-small.sql shows how you can create CDATA elements where the text size is small using the XMLCdata function

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