Starting with release 10g, Oracle is phasing out Long fields. I have two words about this: Thank God! Long fields are an ETL nightmare. You can’t use any string functions on them. The OLEDB/ODBC drivers can’t read them.
If you’re a PeopleSoft developer and you’re thinking about creating a LONG field, ask yourself if it’s really worth the headache you’re creating for everybody down the road. Is VARCHAR2(4000) adequate? Is that one in a thousand case really important enough to justify all the extra time it will take extract this data out in the future? If the answer is yes, get with the times and use CLOB instead.
Incidentally, Microsoft has followed the leader and is depreciating text and ntext data fields in SQL 2005. They have replaced them with VARCHAR(MAX).