> won't running in an app server using JTA transactions result in the
> tx starting when the JTA transaction starts and the connection is
> assigned to the thread, whichever occurs second?

Yup, but it is anyway controlled by external code. I meant that it is not
possible to start transaction from the application:

- when you run in non-managed environment, you cannot do this because there
is no public method there and JDBC specs explicitly say that tx is started
when first statement is executed;

- when you run in managed environment, managed code has no means to start
its own transaction - it is started by the environment before.

Roman