Agreed; if leaving tombstones around on remote nodes makes sense, it makes sense to do it locally as well. I was trying to think how this could break things; e.g. app removes some data and then tries to recreate it. Say an admin creates a "user" account entity; realizes he's mucked it up, deletes it and starts over with the same id. He could get version conflicts when he starts over. But: 1) With the present approach of tombstones on remote nodes, that problem already exists, if the admin happens to work on a different node when he starts over. 2) If implicit data versioning is used, it wouldn't be a problem. 3) If explicit data versioning is used, it could be a problem. But perhaps that can be handled in the Hibernate/JBC integration, which separately handles cache insertions of newly created entities. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4097186#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...