Resolving this and will open new JIRA issues for the remaining tasks.

Earle - kicking this over to you for the stuff we talked about, lemme know if you want me to review anything

Confirmed Oracle hibernate for this is now working on http://nightly2.sakaiproject.org:8082/portal

Integrated in sakai-trunk-java-1.7 #105 (See http://builds.sakaiproject.org:8080/job/sakai-trunk-java-1.7/105/)
attempting to fix up oracle related stupidness caused by hibernate being stupid - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3719905/why-has-hibernate-switched-to-use-long-over-clob (Revision 307777)

Result = SUCCESS

Hibernate is being dumb with the text fields:
Unsuccessful schema statement: create table SAKAI_CONFIG_ITEM (ID number(19,0) not null, NODE varchar2(255 char), NAME varchar2(255 char) not null, VALUE long, RAW_VALUE long, TYPE varchar2(255 char) not null, DEFAULT_VALUE long, DESCRIPTION long, SOURCE varchar2(255 char), DEFAULTED number(1,0) not null, REGISTERED number(1,0) not null, SECURED number(1,0) not null, DYNAMIC number(1,0) not null, CREATED timestamp not null, MODIFIED timestamp not null, POLL_ON timestamp, primary key (ID))
java.sql.SQLException: ORA-01754: a table may contain only one column of type LONG

So I switched them over to 4000 char strings. Generally speaking I doubt the content will ever come anywhere close to that size but it provides room to grow. Hopefully hibernate will convert it to something more useful.