When a sample job is executed, it imports the simple container definition. However, this should already be loaded by the batch launcher. Even with singleton scoped beans, this can cause spring to duplicate beans. This has no immediate consequence in the samples, but modeling my job after the samples caused my job to fail. Using an hsqldb-based in-memory datasource, I found that my job could not be initialized since it tried to load my schema definition twice and failed on the second time with SQLExceptions of the 'table already exists' variety.