I need to select the first 255 characters from a Long

I have a table as such

MYTABLE (
PKEY CHAR(10) NOT NULL,
MYCOMMENTS LONG NULL
)

I want the equivalent of the following
SELECT PKEY, SUBSTR(MYCOMMENTS, 255) FROM MYTABLE;

I realize that I can't use SUBSTR. I also can't use UTL_RAW or DBMS_LOB.

Does anyone have either a SQL or PL/SQL solution that will work in Oracle 8.1.7.3. The OS is Windows NT 4.0 SP6, not that it matters.

Thanks.

You can use an PLSQL explicit cursor to retrieve up to 255 characters of the
long column data.


DECLARE
v_target VARCHAR2(255);
BEGIN
for c1 in (select v_long from test) LOOP
v_target := substr(c1.v_long,1,255);
dbms_output.put_line (v_target);
end LOOP;
END;

Solution Explanation:
=====================

This solution will work as long as the long column contains no more than 32k
of data. When you declare a statement in this way, the long information
is retireved into a pl/sql VARCHAR2 variable, which, unlike SQL, has a limit
on it's size of 32k bytes. Once the value is retrieved into the variable,
the substr function can be performed on it to give the required result.

Note:
=====
The real limit on the above code example is the DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE function.
There is a 255 byte limit on the DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE function.

Thanks for the help Stecal. This should work well!