I see this had been implemented for the Criteria API which has now been deprecated. Is it likely that we’ll see this feature return in CriteriaBuilder?

Here is what a minor issue makes me do:

@Override
@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
public List<NavlinkItem> findWithNavlink(Navlink navlink) {
String statement = "select id, version, name, description, image, image_over as imageOver, url, blank_target as blankTarget, language_code as languageCode from navlink_item where navlink_id = :navlinkId order by language_code nulls first";
Query query = getSession().createSQLQuery(statement)
.addScalar("id", StandardBasicTypes.INTEGER)
.addScalar("version", StandardBasicTypes.INTEGER)
.addScalar("name")
.addScalar("description")
.addScalar("image")
.addScalar("imageOver")
.addScalar("url")
.addScalar("blankTarget", StandardBasicTypes.BOOLEAN)
.addScalar("languageCode");
query.setInteger("navlinkId", navlink.getId());
return query.setResultTransformer(Transformers.aliasToBean(NavlinkItem.class)).list();
}

instead of:

public List<NavlinkItem> findWithNavlink(Navlink navlink) {
Criteria criteria = getSession().createCriteria(getPersistentClass());
criteria.add(Restrictions.eq("navlink", navlink)).addOrder(Order.asc("languageCode").nullsFirst());
return criteria.list();
}

It's too bad this issue is still in the way, for all my integration tests developed against a MySql database now fail against Oracle 10g XE.

It would be very helpful to have Hibernate offering something like:
Order.Asc("myproperty").Nulls.First()

I think you should change this priority, it's not a minor changed, since we have 59 votes for this.

This would be quite helpful for making applications behave more consistently across databases; I ran into this when I noticed that H2 (which we use for testing) sorts nulls lower, whereas PostgreSQL (which we use in production) sorts nulls higher...