I started an application with Hibernate 3.2 and PostgreSQL 8.4. I have some byte[] fields that were mapped as @Basic (= PG bytea) and others that got mapped as @Lob (=PG Large Object). Why the inconsistency? Because I was a Hibernate noob.

Now, those fields are max 4 Kb (but average is 2-3 kb). The PostgreSQL documentation mentioned that the LOs are good when the fields are big, but I didn't see what 'big' meant.

I have upgraded to PostgreSQL 9.0 with Hibernate 3.6 and I was stuck to change the annotation to @Type(type="org.hibernate.type.PrimitiveByteArrayBlobType"). This bug has brought forward a potential compatibility issue, and I eventually found out that Large Objects are a pain to deal with, compared to a normal field.

So I am thinking of changing all of it to bytea. But I am concerned that bytea fields are encoded in Hex, so there is some overhead in encoding and decoding, and this would hurt the performance.

Are there good benchmarks about the performance of both of these? Anybody has made the switch and saw a difference?