I was hoping that someone here may have also run into this. My web application was running on on MySQL with no issues. I am porting it over to now run on Derby and am running into some issues inserting NULL values into simple VARCHAR fields. I'm running iBatis 2.1.6 and when I try an update statement to my table I am getting the following SQL Exception: An attempt was made to get a data value of type 'VARCHAR' from a data value of type '0'. The fields I am updating allows NULL values and is declared simply as a VARCHAR(20). The version of Derby I'm using is 10.1.1 The reason that I'm asking on this list is since I don't have control of the underlying set functions for setting my PreparedStatement/Statement values maybe there was something I needed to tweak to get iBatis running with Derby. Thanks for any help.