OK - I figured it out. You cannot perform a where/like query on an ORACLE long datatype as it expects an integer. I changed the datatype to a CLOB and then retrieved the field into a temp var. I then added the user input to the temp var and finally updated the record by use of cfqueryparam:

UPDATE theTable SET theColumn = <cfqueryparam value="#tempVar#" cfsqltype="CF_SQL_LONGVARCHAR"> WHERE theTableID = theTableIDValue

..equally I can now perform a search on the CLOB datatype:

SELECT theColumn FROM theTable WHERE theColumn LIKE <cfqueryparam value="%#tempVar#%" cfsqltype="CF_SQL_LONGVARCHAR">

I award myself 100 bonus points...

Jam