Normally, you would expect the container to invoke ejbActivate() when the entity bean instance is taken out of the pool to become associated with a specific
EJB object. But if there is no pooling, then I'd say that the container would have to create a new bean instance and invoke its ejbCreate() method.
Or to put it another way, you would expect either ejbActivate() or ejbCreate() to be invoked.
Corrections, please, if I've got this wrong ...