HI Stefan,
the way Pool/Cluster tables are stored on SAP HANA is not different in any way to any other DBMS we support. Reconstructing the data is of course possible (the DBSL does it, so any SQL client could), but the actual compression and encoding scheme is not officially documented afaik.
And my impression (==> not knowing it for sure) is that the texts data is encoded into a VARDATA column in the same compressed format.
Hmm... maybe "...binary format that cannot be processed directly by SQL...." was misleading here. I meant that the data from the binary columns need to be decoded by the client application after retrieval.
Cheers, Lars