Best Practices

Typically, you use bean-managed persistence if you want complete control of managing persistence, you're writing persistence logic to a very proprietary legacy database system, or your persistent store is not a database.

Extra effort is required to achieve portability for an enterprise bean that uses bean-managed persistence because the bean needs to ensure portability across all database as well as JDBC drivers. The foremost factor affecting portability relates to the SQL language. Many database vendors provide proprietary extensions to SQL to provide additional functionality and to achieve higher performance. Consider using only standard SQL constructs to achieve portability. If you do need to use proprietary extensions, consider using the data access object design pattern to encapsulate vendor-specific code.