programming languages and surroundings

Today I had to change a hibernate query constructed with the criteria API to a SQL query. The result looked like:

String sqlQuery = "select count(*) ...";
Session dbSession = getSession();
SQLQuery crit = dbSession.createSQLQuery(sqlQuery);
crit.setCacheable(true);
return (Integer) crit.uniqueResult();

The former query was cached and the new one should be too. But I got the following exception:

java.lang.ClassCastException: java.math.BigDecimal
at org.hibernate.cache.StandardQueryCache.put(StandardQueryCache.java:83)

The following post from hibernate forum helped me to find a solution. The exception is gone after adding the result as a scalar. And the working query looks like:

String sqlQuery = "select count(*) as result ...";
Session dbSession = getSession();
SQLQuery crit = dbSession.createSQLQuery(sqlQuery);
crit.addScalar("result", Hibernate.INTEGER);
crit.setCacheable(true);
return (Integer) crit.uniqueResult();