http://www.hibernate.org/73.html introduces the BinaryBlobType, i.e. transferring data as byte[] instead of a java.sql.Blob

The wiki page says that 'it's sometimes useful to read the whole blob into memory and deal with it as a byte array'.

It later states that 'Blobs aren't cachable. By converting the blob into a byte array, you can now cache the entity.'

That's one benefit. What are the other occasions when you'd want to use it?