My feeling on this is still about a -0; i.e. I think its better to just do it atomically but I don't feel strongly about it. Doing it non-atomically requires careful coding that's going to be easy for later maintainers to break. Also, the use case I described where continuing after failure is valid is based on the fact that the persistent data is "gold" while the in-memory data is just a speed optimization. That means that if the persistent transfer fails, the transferred in-memory data needs to be removed. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3972401#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...