There was a time, many moons ago 
when CLOB, BLOB and BFILE did not exist as data types. So if you had anything longer than a few kilobytes of data to store, you had to use a LONG or a LONG RAW. But those data types came with all sorts of restrictions and frustrations, and we all embraced the improvements that the LOB data types brought in Oracle 8. But of course, we carry a lot of that historical “baggage” in the data dictionary.
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Those pesky LONG columns
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