The main reason why server peer id is not a string, is it's used in the PK of tables in the schema. Making it a string would increase DB size and slow things down. Ints are very difficult (if not impossible) to make globally unique without getting them from some shared counter (e.g. using JGroups). Also the id must be unique - for the life time of the server, not just on a single run, so would need to be persisted after generating. It's hard to see what we could do here, and, as Clebert says, if we were to make a change from int to string it would be a big change and unlikely to happen in 1.4 which is maintenance mode. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4180949#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...