Question: If entity.getHistory() is null following code snippet:

(getEntityManager() returns spring injected EntityManager, database field history type is: text or varchar2(2000)

```
Query query = getEntityManager().createNativeQuery("insert into table_name(..., history, ....) values (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)")
[...]
.setParameter(6, entity.getHistory())
[...]

query.executeUpdate();

```

Gives strange exception:

```
17/11/11 06:26:09:009 [pool-2-thread-1]  WARN util.JDBCExceptionReporter:100 - SQL Error: 0, SQLState: 42804
17/11/11 06:26:09:009 [pool-2-thread-1] ERROR util.JDBCExceptionReporter:101 - ERROR: **column "history" is of type text but expression is of type bytea**

```

Hint: You will need to rewrite or cast the expression.

Problem occurred only in this configuration:  

OS: CentOS release 5.6 (Final)  

Java: 1.6.0\_26  

DB: PostgreSQL 8.1  

JDBC Driver: postgresql-9.1-901.jdbc4  

Application Server: apache-tomcat-6.0.28

Everything is working fine on few other configurations or when history is empty string.
Same statement executed from pgAdmin works fine.

I guess problem is in PostgreSQL JDBC driver, is there some sensible reason to treat null string as a bytea value? Maybe some strange changes between Postgres 8 and 9?

Answer: 
Using Hibernate specific Session API works as a workaround:

```
String sql = "INSERT INTO person (id, name) VALUES (:id, :name)";
Session session = em.unwrap(Session.class);
SQLQuery insert = session.createSQLQuery(sql);
sql.setInteger("id", 123);
sql.setString("name", null);
insert.executeUpdate();

```

I've also filed [HHH-9165](https://hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HHH-9165) to report this issue, if it is indeed a bug.
The JDBC setNull with sql type parameter is fallback for legacy JDBC drivers that do not pass the JDBC Driver Test Suite.

One can guard against null errors within the query as follows:

SELECT a FROM Author a WHERE :lastName IS NULL OR LOWER(a.lastName) = :lastName

This should work in Postgresql after the fix of this [issue](https://github.com/pgjdbc/pgjdbc/issues/3).