There doesn't seem to be a way to specify that a column is "binary" or some other funky type. Is this somehow not necessary with annotations + Hibernate3 or am I missing it?

Thanks,
Gili

Is @org.hibernate.annotations.Type what I'm looking for? How do I know what type Hibernate infers by default if I omit this argument? Is the only way to find out to persist an object then check the DB to see the type that was generated? Is there an easier way?

@Type is what you want.
The inference is done by the hibernate core and is DB dependent (through the dialect).