Lets face it, Long Raw is not something that we like but recently, I was working on itnegration with Vendor system and apparently Vendor had tons of tables with Long Raw data type as column. Now, coming from .net, it was really hard to comprehend on how to read the data because when you query the table directly, it gives you funky value. Something like 436F6D7061696E616E74202D20436F6D6D656E74733A2054686573652061726520636F6D6D656E7473

Here is a quick code snippet that lets you convert the Oracle Long Raw data type to ascii string.

Select text from table_name where blah=blah;

OracleBinary longRaw = null;
longRaw = oReader.GetOracleBinary(0); // Assuming ordinal 0 is the long raw column; In my case text
string sReturn = string.Empty;
System.Text.Encoding enc = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII;
sReturn = enc.GetString(longRaw.Value);
return sReturn;

The key is the conversion of byte to ascii which System.Text.Encoding.ASCII object allows you to do.