hibernate 2.1x and Blobs
I had troubles storing blobs using Hibernates “binary” type in an Oracle 9i DB. I could write whatever i wanted bot always got only 86 bytes back. It turns out that this is the BLOB locator. Well…. not what i wanted.
hansonchar to the rescue
I should mention that i was not in control of the JDBC Driver of the target/live platform and also not in control of the hibernate version used. (Freelancers are not the ones to tell sysadmins that some drivers are outdated 
)