While converting the code of org.hibernate.engine.jdbc.BlobProxy to standard Java, the type safety is improved and this helped me to identify some issues with the current code:

• a long was implicitly casted to int without warnings nor checks
• one method could throw a SQLException (a checked exception) without actually warning about this on the signature

Luckily the methods invoking the dodgy method are internal and happened to catch SQLException for other reasons.

Also, this will avoid some auto-boxing.