The term container-managed persistence (CMP) means that the EJB container handles all database access required by the entity bean. When coding to the J2EE 1.4 specification, you create CMP entity beans and then describe how the entity beans, CMP fields and CMR relationships are mapped to the database in a deployment descriptor.
With the introduction of the Java EE 5 specification, you can use Java Persistence API entity classes instead of entity beans and use annotations to descibe the mappings and relationships.