We are currently developing an application that will end up having 3 SessionFactory instances, with slightly different mappings pointing to the same database and tables. Unfortunately timescales of the project is restricting our ability to rationalize these to use a single SessionFactory.

One will be used for general updating, while the other two will be used for search queries.

Can anyone offer any advice on the pro's/con's of this type of useage, in particular is there anything that may give us problems.

Many thanks.

Shouldn't be a problem as long as you're not using the second-level cache. If you do, you'd have to use a cluster cache to synchronize the SessionFactories.

Thanks for the quick response, we're using the second level cache on one of the SessionFactory configurations, the other two won't use them as they are for searching only. So I guess we should be ok.