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: 
There's a simple fix: when you're building the query string, if a parameter is going to be null -- use "null" instead of "?".

As @araqnid says, Hibernate is incorrectly casting null values into type bytea because it doesn't know any better.
Most of above answers are meaningful and helped me to narrow down issue.

I fixed issue for nulls like this:

```
setParameter(8, getDate(), TemporalType.DATE);

```