title: Force JPA entity field type to BLOB
body: <p>In an existing Java EE application there is a JPA entity which contains a string array as a field. Bad, but it is what it is. There are no annotations for it whatsoever and running the application results in Hibernate (on JBoss EAP 6.1 Alpha and MySQL 5.6) storing it as <code>TINYBLOB</code>. This obviously fails as soon as the string array contains more than a couple values but yet it works fine as long as the array is not too big.</p>
  
  <p>Is there any way to force via JPA 2 (not Hibernate!) annotation that the field is treated as BLOB instead of <code>TINYBLOB</code>?</p>
  
  <p>Using the following will actually create a column of type <code>BLOB</code> during setup but when trying to store an instance of the entity it still fails with </p>
  
  <pre><code>java.lang.ClassCastException: [Ljava.lang.String; cannot be cast to java.lang.String"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Field annotation definition:</p>
  
  <pre><code>@Lob
  @Column(columnDefinition = "blob")
  </code></pre>