Hi,
This may or may not help...
You can use PrepareStatement's getObject(x) and setObject(x,y) methods to store and retrieve the values.
We use the Base64Encoder class (
http://www.servlets.com/cos/index.html or similar) to encode and decode the objects (we store images, pdfs, worddocs, etc).
Once you retrieve the decoded object as a byte[], you can pass it into something like ImageIcon.
Chrs,
Ash