Good for you, But I think it just makes it harder if you want to add a more tighter link. For example when you want a foreign key relation between actorId and user or role table. I guess in your case you are able to determine from your actor id: 1) if it is a role or user (or something else) 2) What the primary key is of the role and user In this case you certainly need an extra query for retrieving roles and users corresponding with the task instances you want, which you can avoid if you have a tighter coupling. When adding the extra table I think you have the best of both worlds no? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4095488#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...