Deadlocks are often inevitable depending on your application usage patterns, this is why we defensively program for this, and catch deadlock and retry after an interval, which is a very standard way of dealing with deadlock. It should be harmless. If you are getting a lot, you should think whether you're doing a lot of stuff on a competing resource. Maybe you have many consumers consuming from the same queue and acknowledging, committng or rolling back concurrently? Moreover with some databases, (I don't know about SQL Server), but with MySQL you can actually get deadlock even if the two competing transactions are only updating a single row. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4049741#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...