Corrupt string when writing to Oracle DB

Question

I am serializing some data to xml, then writing the output to an Oracle DB.

The serialized data can be very long and is writing to a column type of LONG (it never will reach the max value of LONG, which is something like 32,000 chars)

Sometimes when my data is written, it appears to corrupt and just display "?" and lots of other control characters, sometimes the write works perfectly.

The function i am using always returns the XML with no problem, the problem occurs when the data is written.

This is my serializer function:

Private Function Serialize(myObject As object)

    //serialize the object to a string...

    Dim x = New System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer(myObject .[GetType]())
    Dim stringWriter = New StringWriter()
    x.Serialize(stringWriter, myObject )

    Dim test = stringWriter.ToString()
    Return stringWriter.ToString()

    stringWriter.Close()

End Function

I am then writing the datawhich is returned to the DB using nHibernate, i will not include this code as it is very long and has worked without fail for a long time. The problem seems to be with how Oracle is interpreting the data.

My unitofwork commits without any error - just the data is corrupt when oracle receives it.

UPDATE

If i copy the stringwriter output, then paste this into the column in the database i can commit without a problem

Answer 1

As advised by wolφi in the comments.

The fix for this was to use CLOB as the column data type. XMLType did not exist in my version of Oracle.