in general, since they are primitives they will never be null as they get the default value for it's type. Nevertheless the idea behind it was to support null so please file a jira issue for it to make them as objects instead of primitives. I think the case where you would encounter it is when you have existing db will data and you upgrade that table and these values are null then by default. In that case it fails, is that what you ran into?
HTH