> Well, I *think* with Hibernate, JDO, or OJB I would have the same
> issues regarding the agents. I would still need to figure out a way
> to have them be able to do queries and database operations without
> having an actual connection to the database.

Each agent looks for some object, not a relation. You formulate your
query in OQL (not suitable for EJB), send this query to server (1 RMI
call), server executes this OQL and returns you back a collection of
objects satisfying the query. How this happens is not your problem.
All these products will cache objects, pool connections, etc.

> Yup, our first implementation was using Jini. But I would still have
> to solve the issue of centralizing the database connections in a
> single process/host. I'm not so much looking for the agent
> infrastructure part of the equation, more so how to keep agents from
> creating database connections without a ton of RMI traffic. As
> always, thanks for your input. I'll check out those other projects
> you mentioned.

Forget about database connections and queries. Your agents need
objects, they don't care about SQL. You create a resource that
provides a query execution capabilities: you give it query, it gives
you objects back. How this happens, how many database calls are
executed, is completely hidden from the agent. It needs data, it gets
data.

Issue of transactions remains open.

Maybe I do not understand the problem you have, sorry.

Roman