Here is a representative stack trace. This had been observed in teiid designer 8.5. I fetched the 8.6 teiid designer code, built and installed in on eclipse to workaround an AuthenticationType issue and have observed this NPE there as well.

!ENTRY org.eclipse.core.jobs 4 2 2014-07-24 15:34:22.685
!MESSAGE An internal error occurred during: "Loading Core provider".
!STACK 0
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.sqm.internal.core.definition.isAuthorizationIdentifierSupported(DatabaseDefinitionImpl.java:2014)
at org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.sqm.server.internal.ui.explorer.providers.content.layout.vnode.ServerExplorerVNodeContentProviderNav.displayDatabaseChildren(ServerExplorerVNodeContentProviderNav.java:391)
at org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.sqm.server.internal.ui.explorer.providers.content.layout.AbstractOnDemandContentProviderNav.getChildren(AbstractOnDemandContentProviderNav.java:116)
at org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.sqm.server.internal.ui.explorer.providers.content.layout.AbstractOnDemandContentProviderNav.getChildren(AbstractOnDemandContentProviderNav.java:239)
at org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.sqm.server.internal.ui.explorer.providers.content.layout.AbstractLayoutProviderNav.getChildren(AbstractLayoutProviderNav.java:85)
at org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.sqm.server.internal.ui.explorer.providers.content.impl.ServerExplorerContentProviderNav.load(ServerExplorerContentProviderNav.java:153)
at org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.sqm.server.internal.ui.explorer.loading.LoadingJob.run(LoadingJob.java:43)
at org.eclipse.core.internal.jobs.Worker.run(Worker.java:53)

This occurs right after a call is made to load the definition.