Don't set your MySQL transaction setting to READ UNCOMMITTED unless you really want to allow dirty reads (do you!?). I think you might've solved the wrong problem...setting READ UNCOMMITTED works because they're running in separate transactions like the previous post said. You should figure out how to get the observer method in the same transaction so you can leave the transaction isolation at whatever it was before. Anybody have suggestions on how might you do this? Can you just annotate observer methods with transaction attributes or is that only for session beans? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4006068#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...