Hello,

There are FAQs and Best Practices which suggest storing y this is done, and how this works in an environment with distributed transactions.

It seems to me as if it would be easier and cleaner to perform "Each interaction with the persistent store in a new Session" (http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/refer ... tions.html), i.e. open & close for each access.

the design I'm looking at is Session Facade -> DAO -> Hibernate

From the examples I've seen, there was very clear transaction demarcation, e.g. from a Session Facade. However, with distributed transactions, the Transaction can be demarcated completely outside the Session Facade (e.g. from a remote app server which is calling into the Session Facade). In this case, there is no way of knowing when the transaction ends, and no way of closing the session.

Thanks,

Vj

If you do open/close on each access, you loose the session cache, object identity, etc.

I am using the second version (the reference counting one) of the ThreadLocalSession class for EJBs, where you can detect when the session can actually be closed (have to be very careful with exception handling though)