Good catch. There are actually two persistence-related services (you can see them in oracle-persistence-service.xml): JDBCPersistenceManager and JDBCChannelMapper. Each of them creates its own tables, so in order to prevent any tables to be created at startup, you need to set <attribute name="CreateTablesOnStartup">true</attribute> on both of them. Well, at least in theory. I discovered a bug that prevented "CreateTablesOnStartup" attribute value to propagate to JDBCChannelMapper, so the service would attempt to always create tables, regardless of configuration. I fixed it (http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBMESSAGING-507) and the fix will be available in CR5. Thank you for your report. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3964454#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...