XML Extract from CLOB Column
We have some XML data loaded into CLOB columns, for reasons too long to explain here we are not using the XMLTYPE, but we do need to extract rows based on conditions of the XML data. For performance reasons we do not want to index the CLOB column. I am looking at ways of inspecting the XML and returning matching results by casting the CLOB out as XMLTYPE and opening up xpath/xquery functions - but need this to be efficient. I have initially used extract().getXXXXVal in the where clause of a select statement, ie. where x.xmltype(clob_col).extract('<xpath>').getNumberVal = nn, but have found this very inefficient with memory usage increasing consistently and CPU hitting 100%. can anyone suggest some alternative methods?