• When working with JSON data from a Kafka topic and storing it in a BYTEA column in a Postgres schema, you can use a VARCHAR column in the table to read the data in JSON format and then cast it into BYTEA.

• Here is an example of casting a VARCHAR to BYTEA in Postgres:

SELECT '\xDeadBeef'::bytea;
SELECT '12CD'::bytea;
SELECT '\x12CD'::bytea;

• If you prefer to go directly to BYTEA, you can use the workaround of defining the column as VARCHAR in the table and then casting it to BYTEA in your query.