What are the advantages of entity beans over session beans?

An entity bean represents an entity such as an employer, student, etc. A session bean is a type of EJB (Enterprise JavaBean) that encapsulates the logic of a business process and business rules. Entity beans offer the following advantages over session beans:

1. Persistence: Entity beans are persistent, i.e., the state of the bean exists beyond the lifetime of the application or the application process. There are two types of persistence: Bean-managed and Container-managed. In Bean-managed persistence, the code contains the calls that access the database. In Container-managed persistence, the EJB container generates the database calls.
2. Shared Access: Multiple clients can share the entity beans. It works within the transactions as the client changes the data.
3. Primary Key: Each entity bean has a unique object identifier that enables the client to locate a particular entity bean.
4. Relationship: An entity bean can relate to other entity beans. Both CMP and BMP can be used to maintain relationships.

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