I saw this comment but didn't find any mention of it in the migration guides. I think it deserves to be noted there and hibernate should at least throw the same comprehensible exception when using this pattern. Nevertheless, I think that replacing this check with a Criteria API is not very convenient. The Criteria API, in my opinion, is suitable for more complex conditional filtering. In addition, as I understand it, the hibernate tends to reduce the gap between hql and sql, and modern RDBMS support the ability to check the nullability of parameter.