"jaikiran" wrote : This looks like a Hibernate EntityManager problem http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/EJB-382. JBoss AS 5.1.0 GA ships with 3.4.0 GA version of Hibernate Entitymanager and the bug is reported against that version. Seems to be fixed in 3.4.1 Yes you're right, I changed the caught exception to PersistenceException and it works as expected. So I hope the next JBoss version can have this hibernate fix (of course if they release it). Thanks for your help. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4238347#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...