Currently, working with a data source connection pool in a Java SE/JPA environment is very cumbersome. I either have to write my own Connection Provider or use a dummy in-memory JNDI provider. It would be great if Hibernate would allow setting the data source via the properties passed in to Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory - just like OpenJPA (see http://openjpa.apache.org/builds/1.0.3/apache-openjpa-1.0.3/docs/manual/ref_guide_dbsetup_thirdparty.html)