It is occasionally useful to be able to take a graph of persistent instances and make them persistent in a different datastore, without regenerating identifier values.
Code:
//retrieve a cat from one database
Session session1 = factory1.openSession();
Transaction tx1 = session1.beginTransaction();
Cat cat = session1.get(Cat.class, catId);
tx1.commit();
session1.close();
//reconcile with a second database
Session session2 = factory2.openSession();
Transaction tx2 = session2.beginTransaction();
session2.replicate(cat, ReplicationMode.LATEST_VERSION);
tx2.commit();
session2.close();