anonymous wrote : Destroying the stale connection upon receiving the fatal exception Or destroying the stale connections when getting them from the Pool will effectively have the same effect. No, it would not. Currently if you have no valid connection checker (or SQL), a fatal exception must be encountered before each individual connection is destroyed. Consider a pool of 100 connections against a database that was restarted. All 100 connections are now invalid, but we don't know until we attempt to use one. 100 failed transactions later, we have a clean pool. What I'm proposing (based on interaction with a WAS user) is a setting which allows a single fatal exception to kill all connections in the pool because we know they aren't going to be usable. This way you limit yourself to 1 (or very few) failed transactions. It's just another way of doing proactive pool management without doing background validation (or validate on match). -Chris View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4158684#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...