I had a look arround and decided that a sevlet was the only option although I am far from an expert.

One word of advice - when you are doing your database ensure that you have your blob in a separate table. I was unable to convince hibernate to lazy load blobs. This meant a 20 line file listing was causing memory errors all over the place.

Also I had to use java.sql.Blob as the datatype - byte[] wouldnt play nicely although thats probably more likely a mysql database driver issue.

I'm using a byte[] and MySQL together and it works fine, although I did have a feeling the lazy loading is being ignored as the original poster said, but haven't tested it properly.

 @Lob
 @Basic(fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
 @Column(nullable = false)
 public byte[] getData() {
 return data;
 }

You can not lazy load a byte[] (how is this supposed to work?)

You can lazy load a byte[] if you run the bytecode instrumentation Ant task of Hibernate, after you declare FetchType.LAZY (which is a hint for the instrumentation in that case).

You can lazy load a java.sql.*lob (that's the whole point of these types).