Hibernate 3.2.2
Postgres 8.2

I'm trying to store a GZIP byte array in my database. My field is a byte[], and my column type is text of unspecified length. with this combination i get the error:
column "myColumn" is of type text but expression is of type bytea

I tried using field type String and converting the byte[] to String using new String(byte[], Charset.forName("UTF8")) (which worked) but when inserting via hibernate I was getting this error:
ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x00

So is there a better data type to use rather than text or is there a way of encoding the byte[] to String so it doesn't cause problems?

going with text data type and Base64 encoding.

I use hibernate-annotations

For storing a file I use byte[]:

@Column(name="xsltToDC")
private byte[] xsltToDC;

And Hibernate creates a field with type: bytea (on PostgreSQL 8.2.4)

Hope this helps