Good point. I was actually thinking about the same thing. I wrote a jndi client that lists out all the objects listed in a server and I did not find the datasources. So the datasources are not stored as objects. I wonder what is happening inside. My guess is that even though there is a jndi name for the datasource it is not a remote object and there is only a local reference to the instance. It is just a non corba, non rmi interface and hence cannot be accessed remotely as such.