So I've been digging about in my code and have discovered that the reason for these queries is not related to web.xml, it's just coincidence that similar queries are defined there. It's actually related to a particular Entity bean (and Entity beans in general I guess). I run a query which returns types of this Entity bean and it seems the extra queries are run for each field of the entity which is a join to another table and has the annotation: @NotFound(action=NotFoundAction.IGNORE) Removal of this annotation stops the queries from running but of course leads to an error when there's an entry in the table that doesn't have a corresponding value in the joined table. So I guess now I ask if this is normal behaviour of @NotFound :-) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4099796#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...