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Asked: 2026-06-14T07:31:26+00:00

I am looking to read in the data that is stored as a CLOB

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I am looking to read in the data that is stored as a CLOB value in my Oracle database. The contents simply are HTML that renders emails that we send through our CRM application. I want to re-create images of the email to include in my reports on crm performance.

I can successfully read the data into SPSS using the following query, which converts the CLOB to a string of length (32750).

GET DATA
  /TYPE=ODBC
  /CONNECT='DSN=<MYDSN>;UID=<USER>;PWD=mypassword;Host=myhost;Port=myport;SID='+
    'SID'
  /SQL='SELECT *  FROM mytable'
  /ASSUMEDSTRWIDTH=32750.
CACHE.
EXECUTE.
DATASET NAME clob_query WINDOW=FRONT.

What I am looking to do is perform a similar query but read the data into R. I attempted the following query and got the error below:

> SQL <-"SELECT to_char(CONTENT) as content from REL_EMAIL_TEMPLATE"
> ds <- sqlQuery(ch, SQL, as.is=T, stringsAsFactors=F)
> ds
[1] "HY000 22835 [Oracle][ODBC][Ora]ORA-22835: Buffer too small for CLOB to CHAR or BLOB to RAW conversion (actual: 5923, maximum: 4000)\n"
[2] "[RODBC] ERROR: Could not SQLExecDirect 'SELECT to_char(CONTENT) as content from REL_EMAIL_TEMPLATE'"

I am not sure how I can make the “buffer” larger, but figure that because I accomplish this in SPSS that R must be able to do this as well.

Many thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I feel like I must have attempted this solution before posting, but I came back to this problem and was able to get it running.

    The only difference this time around is that I only tried to pull 1 record into R using a WHERE clause.

    Here is my query:

    SQL <- "SELECT TO_CHAR(CONTENT) FROM RELATEMGR.REL_EMAIL_TEMPLATE WHERE primary_key = 1"
body <- sqlQuery(ch, SQL, stringsAsFactors=F)

    Weird. Not sure if a different version of R matters either, but at least this got me to where I needed to be.

    Just for completeness sake:

    > sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.0 (2012-03-30)
Platform: i386-pc-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] RODBC_1.3-6

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_2.15.0
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