title: Handling Start Up Issues With NHibernate In Global.asax
body: <p>I have a WCF Service, hosted inside of IIS, using NHibernate for data access.</p>
  
  <p>In my Global.asax I configure NHibernate on Application_Start. This means that I only perform the expensive task of setting up all of the mappings once for my WCF Service.</p>
  
  <p>The only problem with this is that if the database was unavailable during start up, the mappings will never get set up (as they will have failed to be set up during Application_Start and the event won't be called again until the app pool is recycled).</p>
  
  <p><strong>How can I handle the NHibernate set up so it occurs only once, except where there is an error (such as the database not being available) in which case it will occur on each request until it works?</strong></p>