We're adding versioning to several of our objects so that we can do optimistic-locking on our writes. Granted, we should have done this from the start. But... since it would be really expensive in our production databases to set version = 0 for all of the rows, I'm wondering if there is a nice way to handle the fact that at first all of the versions will be NULL.

I've considered triggers in the database, etc but none of that will help because the update statement will be expecting the version to be something other than NULL I believe.

Regards,

Pete

I am running into a similar issue that i cannot update all existing records to have a value for the version column. This is problematic because hibernate seems to fail when it tries to update such records. I believe the update query fails because of the null. Has anyone figured out a way around this? The only way i could think of was to write a named query and use executeUpdate() but in the query do something like this:

UPDATE
...
..
where id = ? and version IS NULL /* as opposed to "version = ?" which does not seem to work */