I have an existing table that i am introducing a new column to handle optimistic locking. This column is incremented via a trigger. However since my table currently has many records i am not populating existing records with a version column value. I have defined my mapping as such:

<version name="version" column="VERSION" type="java.lang.Long" generated="always"/>

What i find is that optimistic locking will always fail if the column value in the db is null even if the value in my entity is also null.

Also there is a NullPointerException thrown when hibernate tries to invoke LongType.next() to get the next verison number (i'm not sure why it does this since i thought that since this column is 'generated' hibernate would make a call to the db to get the next version # after a successful update)

Has anyone figured a way to solve this? I'm currently using hibernate 3.1