Hibernate order by with nulls last

Given that HHH-465 is not fixed and is not going to get fixed in a near future for the reasons given by Steve Ebersole, your best option would be to use the CustomNullsFirstInterceptor attached to the issue either globally or specifically to alter the SQL statement.

I'm posting it below for the readers (credits to Emilio Dolce):

public class CustomNullsFirstInterceptor extends EmptyInterceptor {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = -3156853534261313031L;

    private static final String ORDER_BY_TOKEN = "order by";

    public String onPrepareStatement(String sql) {

        int orderByStart = sql.toLowerCase().indexOf(ORDER_BY_TOKEN);
        if (orderByStart == -1) {
            return super.onPrepareStatement(sql);
        }
        orderByStart += ORDER_BY_TOKEN.length() + 1;
        int orderByEnd = sql.indexOf(")", orderByStart);
        if (orderByEnd == -1) {
            orderByEnd = sql.indexOf(" UNION ", orderByStart);
            if (orderByEnd == -1) {
                orderByEnd = sql.length();
            }
        }
        String orderByContent = sql.substring(orderByStart, orderByEnd);
        String[] orderByNames = orderByContent.split("\\,");
        for (int i=0; i<orderByNames.length; i++) {
            if (orderByNames[i].trim().length() > 0) {
                if (orderByNames[i].trim().toLowerCase().endsWith("desc")) {
                    orderByNames[i] += " NULLS LAST";
                } else {
                    orderByNames[i] += " NULLS FIRST";
                }
            }
        }
        orderByContent = StringUtils.join(orderByNames, ",");
        sql = sql.substring(0, orderByStart) + orderByContent + sql.substring(orderByEnd); 
        return super.onPrepareStatement(sql);
    }

}

We can create Pageable object with following Sort parameter:

JpaSort.unsafe(Sort.Direction.ASC, "ISNULL(column_name), (column_name)")

We can prepare HQL as well:

String hql = "FROM EntityName e ORDER BY e.columnName NULLS LAST";

You can configure "nulls first" / "nulls last" in hibernate properties so it will be picked up by any criteria call by default: hibernate.order_by.default_null_ordering=last (or =first).

See this hibernate commit for details.

This feature has been implemented during Hibernate 4.2.x and 4.3.x releases as previously mentioned.

It can be used as for example:

Criteria criteria = ...;
criteria.addOrder( Order.desc( "name" ).nulls(NullPrecedence.FIRST) );

Hibernate v4.3 javadocs are less omissive here.