Hi All-

Couple of quick questions:

1) If using Hibernate primarily form stateless session beans (and MDB's), is it preferable to use the app server's DB connection pool, or does it make any difference?

2) Is it preferable to explicitly manage Hibernate transactions, or let the container manage them?


Some points i'm particularly interested in on these questions is which approach has proven out more, which performs better, and which is less complicated to implement.

Thanks,
Brandon

1) It would recommend using the application server's datasource. Simple to get access to it and it is likely to be closer to a production quaility implementation.
2) CMT is easy to setup and use. My view is that there only a few reasons why you would consider using EJB container. CMT is one of those reasons. It does make the code more compact as well.

Performance is subjective and I have not performed any tests at all. Having said that, if you do some caching the JNDI lookup costs are minimal and you would expect the container implementor to have spent some time optimising the transaction management layer. Obviously, its best to perform your own tests as each environment and application has different demands.