(as reported by ab)

In the update 1.5-to-1.6 script, the following SQL does not work:

ALTER TABLE ezpending_actions MODIFY (param varchar2(3000));

This happens because oracle does not allow simple alter tables when the column is a LOB (doh!).
We need to use some smarter trickery to work around this - and patch it in releases 1.6 ... 2.0, in case somebody tries to do the upgrade following the correct path...