"estaub" wrote : Hibernate/JPA can't solve the identity problem when the requirement is to apply a specific externally-generated identifier to the process and be able to reference the process by it later. This is a frequent business requirement. | IMO, HB/JPA could do a better job of supporting the object identity versus object equality problem. "estaub" wrote : In BPEL, all of the "Correlation Set" support addresses this - far more comprehensively than you/we perhaps have any need for. correlation is related. but i don't see how this justifies the need for business keys. it could only show the opposite. namely that a single business key is not sufficient. to support correlation in bpel, we would need a set of correlations (set of set of primitive values) for each process instance. regards, tom. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4016322#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...