I am unable to find support for "nulls last" in HQL order by clauses.

Is it easy to extend or override implementations to add support for something like this?

Thanks,

Andrew

This really is an issue with the database and does not have anything to do with Hibernate. Hibernate simply issues the "order by" in the generated sql and then just returns it in the order supplied by the database.

That is why I need to extend Hibernate to support the execution of a NULLS LAST order by clause for Oracle.

I'm not sure of the appropriate place to do this, and if there is interest in putting this on the "wish list".

Can you describe the exact syntax of this?
Can you google and tell us which other databases support this?

Once this done, i'll submit the question to the team.

It is problematic for the developer to not have control over sorting of nulls.

In different DBs, the sorting of nulls relative to other values is handled differently.

PostgreSQL - Nulls are considered HIGHER than non-nulls.
DB2 - Higher
MSSQL - Lower
MySQL - Lower
Oracle - Higher

"NULLS LAST" is part of the SQL 99 standard.

The syntax is as follows:

ORDER BY [COLUMN NAME] [ASC | DESC] [NULLS FIRST | NULLS LAST]

The following DBs have supported this functionality:

DB2 V7
Oracle 9i

PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLServer do not appear to support this from what I can gather.