Read clob from Oracle

What comes to your mind first when I say clob? Well, don't worry if you are not able to think anything about it. It’s nothing but a type used to store 4 GB of data in the database. I work with an Oracle db & today had to read a clob out parameter from Oracle procedure in .NET. Infact, I had to rewrite some code as the out param was initially of type varchar & then changed to clob. It’s a bit tricky & Google din’t come to my rescue this time & I figured it out using watch window of Visual Studio.

Code I had written when the out param was varchar is as below:

errorCode = Params[3].Value.ToString();

and re written as below to read a clob:

errorCode = ((Oracle.DataAccess.Types.OracleClob)(Params[3].Value)).Value.ToString();

Hope this snippet comes to your mind when you deal with Oracle datatypes like BFile, Blob, Clob, Binary, etc.