I don't think the question was answered, so I'll restate it. Each time the application deploys inside the J2EE container, jBPM is creating new definitions of the same process. This leads to much database bloat if you've got more than a few non-trivial business processes. The hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=update setting controls the creation of the tables in which the workflows are defined. The question is how do we as jBPM users keep jBPM from redefining the workflow each time the container restarts or redeploys? It is not a hibernate issue since we can control when hibernate recreates or updates the tables, but is a jBPM deployment issue to keep it from continuing defining new processes that are not necessary. Thanks, Jack View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3998017#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...