encoding on a byte[]

[M Burke]

I am moving blobs from one Oracle table to another. When I get the stream, the ejb requires it to be converted to a String to be stored as a Long Raw type.

Do I need to worry about encoding the string? Can I find the encoding on the byte array?

[Rick O'Shay]

What kind of EJB is it and why is the LONG RAW column being converted to a string? Assuming it's an entity bean is it BMP or CMP and in any case why is the LONG RAW column being convereted to a string? As to whether encoding is important, I should think so if you are not the only consumer of that column. Other systems are going to have expectations about the format that you cannot change. Need more details.