For those interested.. there is a discussion on the hibernate-dev mailing list currently about removing this ability to dynamically determine "enum type" (named v. ordinal) during nullSafeSet/nullSafeGet (aka using JDBC metadata). We have seen too many cases where this is problematic against too many JDBC drivers not properly implementing java.sql.ParameterMetaData#getParameterType and/or java.sql.ResultSetMetaData#getColumnType.

The mapping above would still work according to the proposal, for what its worth.