To keep this to the point my personal experience of using the two above depends on what you want to do with the data.
CLOB is best if you are keeping the data in a native Oracle database. You can still set up a data connection via ODBC and export them via a view to use with a reporting app such as Crystal etc.
You can do similar with XMLType, but XMLType has to be set up correctly, the benefits of XMLType is you can use it accross different database platforms. For example transferring the data between an Oracle 10G platform and SQL Server 2005 platform.
If you want to keep the data in its native database, use CLOB.
Hope this helps.
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by: sdstuberPosted on 2009-11-06 at 11:27:05ID: 25762260
with xmltype you know your content is valid, implicitly.
<tag1>somedata</tag_1>
is a valid clob, and certainly readable but its not correct, so it can't be stored in xmltype.
so, clobs are handy if you might need to store a document that "should" have been xml but for whatever reason isn't.
on the other hand, if you store invalid data you will need to check for that when you read it.
if you ever parse the xml, you will need to convert it to xmltype, and you'll do it everytime if it's a clob which can be expensive if you're doing it a lot.