Add check in persistence casting for nulls, update new entity persist

There was an issue discovered while digging through an error in the Profile API, where sometimes Hibernate would provide null refernces for queries. This was discovered while attempting to detach these entities, which caused NPEs.

Additionally, an update is made to how new data points are persisted to better handle auto_increment or generated columns.

core/pom.xml

@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
   <parent>
     <groupId>org.eclipsefoundation</groupId>
     <artifactId>quarkus-commons</artifactId>
-    <version>0.7.1</version>
+    <version>0.7.2-SNAPSHOT</version>
     <relativePath>../pom.xml</relativePath>
   </parent>
   <properties>