I agree with Benson entirely with one caveat. It seems to me that there might be two categories of things being discussed
1. User data (keys and values) 2. Ancillary things needed for operation of Accumulo (passwords). These could well be considered separately. Trying to do anything with keys and values other than treating them as bytes all of the time I find quite scary. And if this is only being done to satisfy pmd or findbugs, those tools can be convinced to modify their reporting about this issue.
