> But you are free to ignore the recommendation.

Pity, he is few weeks late to our bashing ;-)

But will NONE be used with strings ? Wasn't there kind of consensus that Java Strings cannot be without encoding, and raw byte arrays like OCTET is to be used for explicit NONE encoding ?

What i remembered from our arguing, is that Java String would always be transcoding, and if topic starter wants data binary-wise "as is", he only would have an option to read VarChars and Blobs into byte arrays ?