For those more knowledgeable than me, please correct me if I'm wrong. 1) Yes, it's hibernate-specific. But, at some point (jpa 2, hopefully), I'm guessing it won't be. 2) I don't think you can live without a transaction. A transaction is needed even for reading from the db. 3) Actually, you can do | <begin-conversation join="true" flush-mode="manual"/> | No, it isn't documented. Speaking of that, could you create a jira issue for that? That got me for a while, too. To do this without an atomic persistence context, I think you'd need to make sure the list containing the new SomeEntity is not in the persistence context when it is flushed at commit time. It's hard to suggest how to do that without knowing more of your code. Or maybe you could try changing cascadeType=All to cascadeType={Merge, Update, Delete} on the annotation for that relationship. I'm less confident about this solution. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4077959#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...