Hibernate on Oracle: mapping String property to CLOB column

Moron alert: it turns out that I had a stale JAR with 9-something Oracle JDBC classes on my classpath. Having cleaned that up, everything simply worked magically with just the following annotations:

@Lob
@Column(name = "PIGGY_DESCRIPTION")
public String getDescription() { return description; }

Blame the fat fingers.

Have you tried dropping the @Lob annotation, and just annotating it with @Column? In my experience, you don't need to tell hibernate the column type for a CLOB, it will determine it on its own.

Can you include a snippet of the client code which is performing the batching operation?