Unable To Avoid The Deadlock

Hi,

Please help with the below deadlock problem :

We are using SQL Server 2000. Our application is a J2EE based. We use Java v 1.5 ,EJB 3.0 ,JBoss-4.2.0 and have sqljdbc.jar v 1.1 driver (to connect to sql server from jboss).

We have a JMS Queue which is unloading a java.util.List object at a time. This List has 5 value objects.

In the session bean I iterate through this list and do the following :

while(importListPeople.hasNext()){
Person value = (Person)importListPeople.next();

//select statement to check if the Person already exists in DB
Person prsn =entityManager.query("SELECT from Person where...");

if(prsn !=null){ //do an update if person already exists

// update person record
// update PersonAV table
// do an insert into personIndexingQueue
// increment the person update counter.

}else{//do a create

entityManager.persist(value);
//insert into personAv table
//do an insert into personIndexingQueue
//increment the person create counter.
}

}

I get the below error when we are running the application
13:04:41,904 WARN [JDBCExceptionReporter] SQL Error: 1205, SQLState: 40001
13:04:41,904 ERROR [JDBCExceptionReporter] Transaction (Process ID 63) was deadlocked on {lock} resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

For log ,sqlprofiler I could narrow down that the deadlock is occurring on the below select statement in the code.

//select statement to check if the Person already exists in DB
Person prsn =entityManager.query("SELECT from Person where...");

This code works if there is only one object in the list.

The above code works on mysql with 20 objects in the list.

Please help.