>> Which is correct :)
>
> I´m not so sure about this ;-)
> I think OCTETS shoud be treated as binary, as it is intended to stored unencoded bytes, like binary blobs (or am i misundertanding OCTETS purposes?)

The main reason for OCTETS to exist is that Firebird does not perform
charset translation when returning data to the client. This is not the
case with other charsets. Also, IIRC Firebird uses 0x00 as padding
character for the CHAR(n) CHARACTER SET OCTETS columns instead 0x20 for
other charsets.

Bad is that CachedRowSet returns an error in the second case. Normally I
would expect that getBytes(...) returns raw data regardless of the
underlying data type.

I will try your example, maybe there is some issue in our driver which
should be fixed.

Roman