(NB: fever and I are working on the same project)

We are using vanilla perl 5.6.1 and we were able to successfully build DBD::Oracle against Oracle 8.1.7 (on Solaris 7). We've been using this system successfully for all kinds of interaction between perl and Oracle including pushing CLOBs in and out of Oracle, using simple insert/select statements. DBD::Oracle is designed, according to it's documentations, to allow you to do this with both BLOBs and CLOBs.

So the problem and frustration we've been facing comes from the fact that DBD::Oracle doesn't appear to be behaving for us according to it's documentation,