Hibernate on Oracle: mapping String property to CLOB column

Question

WARNING: see my own answer below. The problem is caused by old Oracle drivers that were present on the classpath in addition to 10.2.0.4. Problem solved. Leaving the rest of this question for posterity.

I've been banging my head against the following. Here's a simple POJO distilled from my application code:

@Entity
@Table(name = "PIGGIES")
public class Piggy {    
    private Long id;
    private String description;

    public Piggy() {}

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    @Column(name = "PIGGY_ID")
    public Long getId() { return id; }
    public void setId(Long id) { this.id = id; }

    @Lob
    @Column(name = "PIGGY_DESCRIPTION")
    public String getDescription() { return description; }
    public void setDescription(String d) { description = d; }
}

There's a String property and a CLOB column. When the contents are short (e.g. "hello world"), it persists just fine. With longer strings, I get the following exception:

java.sql.SQLException: operation not allowed: streams type cannot be used in batching
        at oracle.jdbc.dbaccess.DBError.throwSqlException(DBError.java:134)
        at oracle.jdbc.dbaccess.DBError.throwSqlException(DBError.java:179)
        at oracle.jdbc.driver.OraclePreparedStatement.addBatch(OraclePreparedStatement.java:4236)
        at org.apache.commons.dbcp.DelegatingPreparedStatement.addBatch(DelegatingPreparedStatement.java:172)
        at org.apache.commons.dbcp.DelegatingPreparedStatement.addBatch(DelegatingPreparedStatement.java:172)
        at org.hibernate.jdbc.BatchingBatcher.addToBatch(BatchingBatcher.java:31)
        at org.hibernate.persister.entity.AbstractEntityPersister.update(AbstractEntityPersister.java:2403)

I'm using Hibernate 3.2.3 with Oracle JDBC driver 10.2.0.4. The exception's message indicates that batching may be at fault. While I can disable batching in this simple case, I need to have it enabled for the "real" POJOs. In fact, as things stand right now, query batching is the only reason we're using Hibernate at all.

So, my question is, how can I make the above work?

EDIT: Interesting observation: the value of my "description" property persists just fine as long as it's exactly 1333 characters long or shorter. Such an odd number!

EDIT 2: In an attempt to find a solution, I modified the getProperty() annotations as follows, which has made no difference:

@Lob
@Type(type="text")
@Column(name = "PIGGY_DESCRIPTION", length = Integer.MAX_VALUE)
public String getDescription() { return description; }

EDIT 3: Here's the DDL for "PIGGIES":

CREATE TABLE "PIGGIES" 
 (  "PIGGY_ID" NUMBER NOT NULL ENABLE, 
"PIGGY_DESCRIPTION" CLOB, 
 CONSTRAINT "PIGGIES_PK" PRIMARY KEY ("PIGGY_ID")
USING INDEX PCTFREE 10 INITRANS 2 MAXTRANS 255 
STORAGE(INITIAL 1048576 NEXT 1048576 MINEXTENTS 1 MAXEXTENTS 2147483645
PCTINCREASE 0 FREELISTS 1 FREELIST GROUPS 1 BUFFER_POOL DEFAULT)
TABLESPACE "BBDATA"  ENABLE
 ) PCTFREE 10 PCTUSED 40 INITRANS 1 MAXTRANS 255 NOCOMPRESS LOGGING
STORAGE(INITIAL 1048576 NEXT 1048576 MINEXTENTS 1 MAXEXTENTS 2147483645
PCTINCREASE 0 FREELISTS 1 FREELIST GROUPS 1 BUFFER_POOL DEFAULT)
  TABLESPACE "BBDATA" 
LOB ("PIGGY_DESCRIPTION") STORE AS "SYS_LOB0000177753C00002$$"(
TABLESPACE "BBDATA" ENABLE STORAGE IN ROW CHUNK 8192 PCTVERSION 10
NOCACHE 
STORAGE(INITIAL 1048576 NEXT 1048576 MINEXTENTS 1 MAXEXTENTS 2147483645
PCTINCREASE 0 FREELISTS 1 FREELIST GROUPS 1 BUFFER_POOL DEFAULT)) ;

And here's the entire stack:

org.hibernate.exception.GenericJDBCException: could not update: [com.bamnetworks.cms.types.Piggy#934]
    at org.hibernate.exception.SQLStateConverter.handledNonSpecificException(SQLStateConverter.java:103)
    at org.hibernate.exception.SQLStateConverter.convert(SQLStateConverter.java:91)
    at org.hibernate.exception.JDBCExceptionHelper.convert(JDBCExceptionHelper.java:43)
    at org.hibernate.persister.entity.AbstractEntityPersister.update(AbstractEntityPersister.java:2425)
    at org.hibernate.persister.entity.AbstractEntityPersister.updateOrInsert(AbstractEntityPersister.java:2307)
    at org.hibernate.persister.entity.AbstractEntityPersister.update(AbstractEntityPersister.java:2607)
    at org.hibernate.action.EntityUpdateAction.execute(EntityUpdateAction.java:92)
    at org.hibernate.engine.ActionQueue.execute(ActionQueue.java:248)
    at org.hibernate.engine.ActionQueue.executeActions(ActionQueue.java:232)
    at org.hibernate.engine.ActionQueue.executeActions(ActionQueue.java:140)
    at org.hibernate.event.def.AbstractFlushingEventListener.performExecutions(AbstractFlushingEventListener.java:298)
    at org.hibernate.event.def.DefaultFlushEventListener.onFlush(DefaultFlushEventListener.java:27)
    at org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl.flush(SessionImpl.java:1000)
    at org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl.managedFlush(SessionImpl.java:338)
    at org.hibernate.transaction.JDBCTransaction.commit(JDBCTransaction.java:106)
Caused by: java.sql.SQLException: operation not allowed: streams type cannot be used in batching
    at oracle.jdbc.dbaccess.DBError.throwSqlException(DBError.java:134)
    at oracle.jdbc.dbaccess.DBError.throwSqlException(DBError.java:179)
    at oracle.jdbc.driver.OraclePreparedStatement.addBatch(OraclePreparedStatement.java:4236)
    at org.apache.commons.dbcp.DelegatingPreparedStatement.addBatch(DelegatingPreparedStatement.java:172)
    at org.apache.commons.dbcp.DelegatingPreparedStatement.addBatch(DelegatingPreparedStatement.java:172)
    at org.hibernate.jdbc.BatchingBatcher.addToBatch(BatchingBatcher.java:31)
    at org.hibernate.persister.entity.AbstractEntityPersister.update(AbstractEntityPersister.java:2403)
    ... 45 more

Answer 1

Moron alert: it turns out that I had a stale JAR with 9-something Oracle JDBC classes on my classpath. Having cleaned that up, everything simply worked magically with just the following annotations:

@Lob
@Column(name = "PIGGY_DESCRIPTION")
public String getDescription() { return description; }

Blame the fat fingers.

Answer 2

Have you tried dropping the @Lob annotation, and just annotating it with @Column? In my experience, you don't need to tell hibernate the column type for a CLOB, it will determine it on its own.

Can you include a snippet of the client code which is performing the batching operation?