75 Understanding TopLink Sessions

A TopLink session provides the primary access to the TopLink runtime. It is the means by which your application performs all persistence operations with the data source that contains persistent objects.

A session associates data source platform information, data source login information, and mapping metadata for a particular application. You can reuse mapping metadata in different applications by defining different sessions.

TopLink provides different session types, each optimized for different design requirements and data access strategies. You can combine different session types in the same application.

This chapter explains the following:

• Session Types

• Session Concepts

• Sessions and the Cache

• Understanding the Session API