That is not really an option since we then would need to change how our application work.
Can you confirm the problem/bug with regards to using function results in sql's in TOracleDataset? Have you tested it yet?
I have just tested implementing a component called ODAC (
http://www.devart.com/odac/components.html) and populating TDBGrid with data from that control.
When I run the report using TOraQuery from ODAC the result is a memory use of 99 MB - when using TOracleDataset the application chrash with "Out of memory" when memory usage exceeds 1300MB.