I'm trying to get some feedback searching through hibernate documentation and JPA specs as well as use cases. I've inherited a j2ee application that uses application managed persistence and has the unique functionality of generating databases (varying only by name) with the same persistence unit via the createEntityManager call.

Each database contains identical data structures and simply houses a unique groups dataset. The database creation is triggered from an administrative event to create a new group.

Ideally I'd like to move to container managed persistence given the amount of boiler plate code surrounding transaction management and difficulty scaling with application managed persistence. Has anyone heard of a similar situation and does hibernate provide any mechanisms to do such a thing? Would horizontal partitioning via sharding be a potential option?

Obviously one of the difficulties as well with dynamic databases seems to be that container managed requires a jdbc resource (using glassfish) and it seems like I'd have to hook into Glassfish's JMX / AMX beans to do any sort of on the fly additions but even that I'm leary of. Currently connection pooling is managed independtly at the application level via c3p0.

Thanks for any help!