Help with handling CLOBs in Oracle and ORA-1460 error

Hi all,

I'm new to the list, and I'm a DBA, not really a Perl programmer, but I'm running into this issue that I hope someone can help with.

I think I'm getting dangerously close to getting this to work.  But, I'm just not quite getting there.

We have an application coded in Perl w/ DBI * DBD::Oracle.  Versions:  Database:  Oracle 11.2.0.1.0, Perl 5.10.1, DBI 1.609, DBD::Oracle 1.23.

We've had a long standing problem of leaking temporary LOBs when handling lobs.  (i.e., count of lobs reported in V$TEMPORARY_LOBS continues to increase till the session disconnects from the database.)  I recently discovered that if you use ORA_CLOB and bind by reference (bind_param_inout) it solves the leak problem.  But my problem now is, prepare works, bind works, but execute hits ORA-1460 "unimplemented or unreasonable conversion requested".

So, my questions are:
If I'm using temporary lobs that are created/managed in Perl, I should use:
$sth->bind_param_inout(':pi_cit_comprep', \$paramHash->{cit_comprep}, {ora_type => ORA_CLOB});

to do the bind?  I think this is correct, as the LOB leaking goes away, but, doing it this way, I hit ORA-1460 on CLOBs larger than 32k.

Previously, I was binding with:
$sth->bind_param(':pi_cit_comprep', $paramHash->{cit_comprep}, {ora_type => ORA_CLOB});

And this never hit the ORA-1460 error, but would leak temporary LOBs.

So, how do I *both* avoid leaking temporary LOBs *and* not encounter ORA-1460 on LOBs larger than 32k?  Is this a bug?  In Oracle?  Perl?  DBI?  DBD::Oracle?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

-Mark