Bertrand, As you probably know, folks usually use the database for key generation because it avoids any possible contention across multiple threads, multiple classloaders (if a singleton is used to address thread synchronization), and multiple servers (if clustering). So... It sounds like you won't get what you're asking for, so maybe back up: why do you need the process ID at that point in time? Maybe there's a different way to do it? Another possibility, which I hesitate to mention, is that you might somehow coerce jBPM+Hibernate to write a "stub" process instance early, with just the id and little else, and fill in the rest later. I have no idea what the ripple from this would be - it seems quite dangerous, and would probably require a lot of code reconciling whenever you want to adopt a new version of jBPM. (I'm a newbie - I may not know what I'm talking about!) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4003308#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...