At the same time the unfortunate consequence is that jobs.xml, which to our feeling is something that lives with code and not with data, has to be copied manually to the external dbpath in scenarios where you redeploy a webapp after some fixes or tuning. So our suggestion is to have something like a "jobs" variable in web.xml that points to an servlet internal jobs.xml (maybe in the WEB-INF folder?) to be used instead of the default one.