One of the most critical aspects of building effective systems is the successful management of semi-structured information. The database is no longer only a place to store dollars and cents for the purposes of accounting. Efficient manipulation of XML and JSON has become one of the most critical elements of contemporary database infrastructure – and in the majority of cases XML or JSON internally are implemented as LOBs. However, few people in the development community really understand the underlying mechanics of Oracle LOB datatypes and consider it yet another DBA issue. This presentation attempts to fill that knowledge gap.