"timfox" wrote : Why are you persisting orders in a database? To clarify, orders are persisted in two databases, one on each system. The two systems belong to different departments (or even different companies) - so there is an ownership issue here and both systems need to save the data. Moreover the database representation of an order is different on each system (different attributes, different relationships) based on their responsibilities. Only the common attributes needed by both systems are passed on the JMS message. I hope this clarifies the need for persisting the orders in the two databases. "timfox" wrote : If you are using persistent messages then the JMS system can guarantee persistence for you. I am confused about this. I believe that JMS persists messages only to guarantee delivery in case the target system is down or not operating correctly. You do not expect me to look at persisted JMS messages as the system of record for my orders, do you? For me these are just text messages on a queue, not first class objects that can be associated with other objects in my database. Moreover, at least conceptually I think of persisted JMS messages to be deleted when the message has been consumed and acknowledged. So they are not a permanent record of my business transactions. Am I missing something? Given these requirements, I know that I will need x milliseconds to store orders in my databases. All I am trying to do now is to make sure that JMS is minimum overhead on my system, which is a completely orthogonal issue. As I said earlier, I am prepared to embrace all the best practices on the JMS side to improve performance as long as I have reliable and performant messaging. I can punt MDBs, JTA, JCA - whatever you say as long as I have a decent alternative. So if you want me to reuse connections, sessions, consumers, producers, tell me how: write my own, use something provided by JBM, or pick something like Spring JMS template (with some connection pooling) and their MDP container! View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4244399#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...