Steve Ebersole It is not different than JTA, and JTA is not very async-friendly, XAResource spec says:

Asynchronous operations are not supported. Java supports multi-threaded processing and most databases do not support asynchronous operations.

I don't want to use vendor-specific features either; I was proposing that the unified syncs could go beyond JTA in this manner (executing CacheSynchronization hooks in the order the javadoc says, and pass the instance to all invocations).