Thanks for the response. So these enum literals ARE stored in this field/column (  REPOSITORY.ITEM_STATES.ITEM_VALUE)? And the value of the field is a gzipped blob that contains XML that specifies what enum has been chosen?

 I was able to get part of the XML extracted by putting the binary data into a hex editor, saving it as a .gz file and extracting the data from there. Unfortunately, it only appears to be part of the XML, though. I guess from here it would be a different question but I'll ask anyways. Should ITEM_VALUE contain the entirety of the XML or is it merely one part of something larger?

@ben from my knowledge it is XML.

Ralph is quite correct in suggesting not to touch the DB directly especially any updates.
But if you want to really read from the column you could try something like below.
ResultSet rs = null;
 PreparedStatement ps = null;
InputStream inputStream = null, rawStream = null;
ByteArrayOutputStream out = null;
try {
ps = conn.prepareStatement(query);
rs = ps.executeQuery();
int start =0;
boolean hasNext = rs.next();
while (hasNext ) {
rawStream = rs.getBinaryStream(column);
inputStream = new GZIPInputStream(rawStream, 8192);
out = new ByteArrayOutputStream(2048);
byte[] bytes = new byte[1024];
int size = -1;
while ((size = inputStream.read(bytes)) > 0) {
out.write(bytes, 0, size);
}
fw.flush();
start++;
hasNext = rs.next();
out.close();
inputStream.close();
rawStream.close();
}