I'm using JDBC to access a PostgresQL database which contains TEXT
fields. That's the Postgres equivalent of a CLOB. I'm storing strings in
this field with PreparedStatement.setCharacterStream() and getting them
back with ResultSet.getCharacterStream() - this works well, but the code
I use to read the data back is ugly:

   private String retrieveText(ResultSet rs, String column)
         throws SQLException
   {
      StringBuffer   buff = new StringBuffer();
      try
      {
         Reader   tr = rs.getCharacterStream(column);
         char[]   cbuf = new char[50];
         int      n;


         while ((n = tr.read(cbuf, 0, 50)) != -1)
            buff.append(cbuf);

         tr.close();
      }
      catch (IOException e)
      {
         ....
      }
      return buff.toString();
   }

It works, but is there something a bit more elegant that I should be
using instead of reading chunks via the the loop?

I've probably missed something that should be obvious, so any hints
would be welcome.