I'm happy to reduce a lot of boilerplate code to use this method.
However, in other cases we have thrown a MissingColumnInResultException when a column is not there.
I think that is more appropriate then just returning a legal value for the long.

This allows code to express that the column is expected to be there.
If you don't know for sure if the column is there or not (if it's optional) then you'd catch the exception and handle it there.
That is still more explicit in code.