JDBC version

I've been experimenting with some versions of PostgreSQL JDBC trying to find
a version that suits the our application:

1) It has to support portuguese characters (like áéíóú etc) directly in SQL
queries.
2) It is desiderable that it supports SQL statements longer than 8k.

Unfortunately the only version I found that seems to address both problems
above (version 7.1-1.2 from jdbc.postgresql.org) seems to be broken in
relation to data types (not gone deeper into that, yet).

Anyway what I would like to ask is if there is a way to use "Large Object"
code to overcome statement length restrictions in the 7.0 series drivers
(which work ok except for that). A detail is that I use FUNCTIONs for
performing INSERT/UPDATE (as if the FUNCTION was a "stored procedure", that
does UPDATE or INSERT when appropriate):

SELECT registerData('my_primary_key', 'a very very long text string')

Is there a way I can do that using

PreparedStatement ps = conn.prepareStatement("SELECT registerData(?,?)");
ps.SetString(1, "my_primary_key");
ps.SetString(2, "a very very very very long string");

That way I could use a more stable driver with long datasets.
Is it possible? Are the LOB functions stable?
Thanks a lot!

--
Ricardo Pardini
rpardini(at)organox(dot)com(dot)br