As far as I understand from the documentation, the <new-connection-sql> attribute and the <valid-connection-checker> attribute merely check to see if the connection returned from the pool is valid or not. I wanted to be able to go into the JMX console and quickly check to see if my configuration for the DataSource was correct or not. The MBean I developed allowed me to do this pretty quickly, and only took about fifteen minutes to write. If anyone needs help implementing the same thing, I can post a skeleton implementation of the MBean interface and service implementation I made here. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4161866#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...