Hi,
with DBInputTable, if you set wrong metadatas on output port 0, you get a NPE.
This is ok that the component does not work with metadata not matching the records it gets from the database, but the error message is not very helpful.
Maybe it could be catched, or a test could be made, to output a more helpful message… this is not a big thing once you know what can cause this error, but you can loose quite some time searching if you don’t !