Introduction StackOverflow is a neverending source of great questions. This time, we are covering this question about using Java 1.8 Optional with JPA and Hibernate. Java 1.8 introduced the java.util.Optional container object that may or may not contain a certain value. Combining Optional and streams is very handy. Therefore, you might want that some nullable entity attributes be exposed as Optional. This article is going to demonstrate what are caveats of using Optional with entity attributes, and how you can overcome them.