well I determined the root cause of the exception I was getting (org.hibernate.PersistentObjectException: detached entity passed to persist: com.cox.beans.entity.TblSecurityAuditNote). It was that I had a loop that was trying to persist an already perstisted/inserted JPA entity into the DB and Hibernate notices this and throws the exception before you get a primary key violation SQLException from DB. So in my case it was a programmer's error. The fix was to set the already persisted entity to null in the array so in the code it will not exec the em.persiste(note) again. I think that the wording of the hibernate exception could be more clear. I still don't understand exactly what it's trying to indicate literally (I now know it's saying you're trying to insert a record in the table which has an existing primary key value). View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4114996#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...