Well though I am still curious, I ahve solved my issue wih an lternate route.

I wrote a small yet robust Java appt o handle this for me. The app retirves mathcing records based on 5 criteria.

All matching recotrdas are then screened for duplicate values within the clob field. I determin duplicates using 1 to 8 values found within the clobs.

since the clobs are all xml i can retive key fields like session id to detemin if they are dupes or not.

at the end, all non-duplicate records have their xml printed to file.