Hi all, Am I correct in my interpretation that Hibernate 4 no longer supports interchangeably being able to use either the Hibernate transaction facade(session.beginTransaction) vs. UserTransaction or CMT? I say this because it appears that I always must call session.beginTransaction() when configured to use JTATransactionFactory, in order to have JtaTransaction->local status of active.  If local status is not active Hibernate makes no attempt to check the provided JtaPlatform if there is a user transaction in process and blows up whenever trying to execute any changes to the db. In 3.x this worked fine since JTATransactionFactory->isTransactionInProgress always tried to find the configured transaction manager and checked the transaction status properly.  But in 4.x I'm not seeing how local status gets set to active to prevent a blow up unless I both call userTransaction.begin() AND session.beginTransaction()...  The same problems exist when interacting through the EntityManager API. Even in the ManagedDrivingTest it looks like it is assumed that the client will call session.beginTransaction() after either a CMT or BMT has been started.  I would cut over to using the Hibernate facade exclusively, but now it throws 'nested transactions not supported' if beginTransaction is invoked multiple times.  The Spring PlatformTransactionManager API deals with multiple layered invocations more gracefully, so I've mostly used that in the past for programmatic transaction management.  But regardless, looking at the source there seems to be a new requirement to always have session.beginTransaction() invoked in application code. I've spent days trying to figure out if I've made a configuration mistake, and at this point I'm at the conclusion that either Hibernate behavior in this area was intentionally changed, or that this is a bug.  If its a bug it would probably break a lot of apps upgrading from 3.x to 4.x that use programmatically controlled transactions.  So I thought I'd just reach out on the mailing list for clarification, or to have an obvious misconfiguration or misunderstanding corrected. For more info on my JTA config there is a forum post I made that is unrelated(realized my error on that topic) here: https://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?p=2454363 Thanks, Zach