Reshma Bidikar

In this article, I will be explaining what is Hibernate SessionFactory and how it works.

Consider the following code that demonstrates a typical Hibernate application:

SessionFactory  sessionFactory = new Configuration().configure().buildSessionFactory();
Session session = sessionFactory.openSession();
Transaction tx = session.beginTransaction();
session.save(person);
tx.commit();
session.close();
sessionFactory.close();

• This code first creates a SessionFactory object. The sessionFactory contains all the data in the hibernate configuration file. The code uses the Configuration class to create the SessionFactory instance.
• The configuration.configure method reads the hibernate.cfg.xml file and sets up the Configuation object using the properties in this file.
• The buildSessionFactory method builds the sessionFactory object using this configuration data.
• The SessionFactory object is usually created only once at the start of the application and kept for later use.
• The SessionFactory corresponds to the database config file. So you will need different SessionFactory instances if your application connects to different databases.
• You can then use the SessionFactory instance to obtain a Session and interact with the database

So I hope this blog post was useful to understand how the SessionFactory works internally. Happy learning!!

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