I've read various articles on the web, but they seem rather scattered on this point. Exactly what do I need to do in my configuration and in my method to get the hibernate session. I'm trying to make some direct sql calls for stored procedures. I have a large code base that I am porting from Ruby with lots of static methods and stored procedure calls. If I need to use the sessionFactory, then how to I get access to it?
From a static method you can pull the sessionFactory bean from the application context:
import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.commons.ApplicationHolder as AH
...
def ctx = AH.application.mainContext
def sessionFactory = ctx.sessionFactory
def session = sessionFactory.currentSession