What is the best way to serialize a file in hibernate. I have this object 'Attachment' which represent a file (such as ms-word), and I want to serialize it to my table. On Oracle the type will be BLOB, on MS-SQL this will be IMAGE and so on.

TIA Oren

if Attachment implements Serializable, in which case the document object can be deserialized as-is if you simply mark it as a hibernate property (no type required)

@hibernate.property

the other option is to use the hibernate type 'blob'.

<property name="bigDocument" type="blob"/>
or,
@hibernate.property type="blob"

in which case you would have to deal with the associated blob semantics in the code