When would you not ever use EXTENDED persistence context in a stateful session bean (which is the only EJB type it can be used in)? To me it seems that the code is cleaner (no unnecessary merge() or whatever) and it only makes sense as a stateful session bean is used to represent conversational state over multiple client calls...by setting an EXTENDED persistence context you recognize that there is a conversation happening. I'm not seeing when you'd not want to use EXTENDED persistence context (I understand it's not the default persistence context). Your thoughts please... Thanks. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3993709#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...