Some remarks on the installer: The usecase for the installer that is used in 3.3 is different than the one for the zip (suite) that was used pre 3.3. If you want to just have the jars, use the maven repo The installer can be executed by issuing: java -jar jbpm-jpdl-3.3.0GA.jar The installer is kind of unpacking things and does some other stuff like e.g. downloading a JBoss AS if you want, or configure an existing JBoss AS to have jBPM run in it. It will support you in configuring your DB. If HSQLDB is choosen, the embedded version will be correctly configured to be used by jBPM. For other DBMS'es the configuration will be mostly complete. In the jbpm datasource file the correct properties still have to be set as well as manually populating the DB with the jBPM tables and user data. The DDL scripts for many databases are in the database directory where jBPM was unpacked. An example script for creating the user tables and populating it with data can be found in the wiki mysql View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4195581#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...