Again, I appreciate you taking the time to explain all of this. I am not using EJB, so I will go with "option 2". Basically you are saying that I should wrap my JDBC inside of a "UserTransaction". This abstracts the actual database transaction from me. If I omit the UserTransaction, then the environment (JBoss) will create one anyway for each Connection I open. Are these correct assumptions? To use the UserTransaction (interface), I need to perform a JNDI lookup like you have shown? Based on the following, the UserTransaction MBean requires no special configuration on my part and is automatically published by JBoss? http://docs.jboss.org/jbossas/admindevel326/html/ch4.chapt.html anonymous wrote : To use the UserTransaction interface in other places, the org.jboss.tm.usertx.server.ClientUserTransactionService MBean must be configured and started. This MBean publishes a UserTransaction implementation under the JNDI name UserTransaction. This MBean is configured by default in the standard JBoss distributions and has no configurable attributes. Thanks again for all your help. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3969913#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...