Mircea/Manik, it could be batch I believe. If you recall Mircea, you and I talked about how to effectively move data across cluster deadlock free - we even agreed we should blog post about it :-) https://issues.jboss.org/browse/ISPN-2156
You're right actually, the temporary cache created is transactional. it is built in the CreateCacheCommand and relies on the DummyTransactionManager, might be better to use batching perhaps? Or even not require for this cache to be transactional?
Yes, we should keep such internal caches as simple as possible.