About Global Application Contexts

A global application context enables application context values to be accessible across database sessions, including Oracle RAC instances.

Oracle Database stores the global application context information in the System (sometimes called “Shared”) Global Area (SGA) so that it can be used for applications that use a sessionless model, such as middle-tier applications in a three-tiered architecture.

These applications cannot use a session-based application context because users authenticate to the application, and then it typically connects to the database as a single identity. Oracle Database initializes the global application context once, rather than for each user session. This improves performance, because connections are reused from a connection pool.

You can clear a global application context value by running the ALTER SYSTEM FLUSH GLOBAL_CONTEXT SQL statement.