The problem is I don't use hibernate directly but through JPA, besides the hibernate's documentation says: anonymous wrote : Hibernate will always use the locking mechanism of the database, never lock objects in memory! But can't find description of behaviour when some thread tries to access an already locked row. It willl be blocked? an exception thrown? Do you think is it possible to achieve this at the object level? by means of locking the entity bean itself? It would be great to do this via some stablished and robust api, the previously cited documentation (Jboss 4.0 official guide) mentions something about it, but not in a useful hands-on way (at least to my taste). Otherwise, is the only option left to implement this ? http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/pessimisticOfflineLock.html best regards View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4127981#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...