Well, yes, I am ultimately trying to do some processing on the field, in this case, convert it to Long, multiply by 1000L, then convert it to Date. I found that this processing resulted in null, so I did something very simple: simply set the value of the variable to the field. And the variable is still null. So the problem remains: a variable whose value is a BigDecimal field is null. Again, using iReport 3.7.5 and H2. I went back to my database and modified the table so that the field value is Long, and now I can successfully convert it to a Date object. So I believe the problem with BigDecimal is an iReport bug.