I was using the COLUMN TRANSFORMS syntax to load LOBs into Oracle using the Oracle external which is a handy way of doing several stuff - from loading LOBs from the filesystem to having constants as fields. In OWB you can use unbound external tables to define an external table using your own arbitrary access parameters - I blogged a while back on this for doing preprocessing before it was added into OWB 11gR2.

For loading LOBs using the COLUMN TRANSFORMS syntax have a read through this post on loading CLOB, BLOB or any LOB, the files to load can be specified as a field that is a filename field, the content of this file will be the LOB data.

So using the example from the linked post, you can define the columns;

Then define the access parameters - if you go the unbound external table route you can can put whatever you want in here (your external table get out of jail free card);

This will let you read the LOB files fromn the filesystem and use the external table in a mapping.

Pushing the envelope a little further I then thought about marrying together the preprocessor with the COLUMN TRANSFORMS, this would have let me have a shell script for example as the preprocessor which listed the contents of a directory and let me read the files as LOBs via an external table. Unfortunately that doesn't quote work - there is now a bug/enhancement logged, so one day maybe. So I'm afraid my blog title was a little bit of a teaser....