Oracle XmlType and ODAC .NET provider

I have been having some issues today with a method that inserted Xml into an XmlType field in an Oracle database. It had been working fine, but recently the Xml had grew in size considerably. I was now getting the following Oracle error returned from the ODAC component:

ORA-01461: can bind a LONG value only for insert into a LONG column

The Insert Query I was running looked a bit like this....

INSERT INTO myTable

(anId, myXmlField)

VALUES

(:anId, :myXmlField);

When I ran the query I had two parameters, the second (:myXmlField) was an Xml string. It was this that caused the issue. Thanks to this post by Stuart Campbell I found out that in order to pass a long string value to an XmlType field you must:

1) Set the parameter type of the xml parameter (:myXmlField) to Clob;

2) Use the XmlType() call in the query:

INSERT INTO myTable

(anId, myXmlField)

VALUES

(:anId, XmlType(:myXmlField));

This did resolve the issue, but in the end I ended up changing the XmlType field into a Clob! This is because 1)I didn't need to xPath the Xml in the database and 2) I couldn't use XmlType implementations in our SqlServer data access layer as we have to support earlier versions of this database.