We're also puzzled by this. Even with the lazy load and lob annotation a byte array is still eagerly loaded... View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4205791#4205791 Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&p=4205791