What role does the SessionFactory interface play in Hibernate?

• The application obtains Session instances from a SessionFactory.
• There is typically a single SessionFactory for the whole applicationå¹¼reated during application initialization. 
•  The SessionFactory caches generate SQL statements and other mapping metadata that Hibernate uses at runtime. 
• It also holds cached data that has been read in one unit of work and may be reused in a future unit of work

SessionFactory sessionFactory = configuration.buildSessionFactory();