Session or Transient Operation

There are two approaches for validating data:

Transient: an ad hoc investigatory method that does not retain the history (see Appendix)

Session: a planned series of investigations that retains the history (see Run a validation session using the API)

When to use

This depends entirely on the desired outcome of the validation effort, but some general assumptions are available to refine the decision.

Because Transient does not store the efforts of validation, it is best served when testing theories or troubleshooting. For example, you have a sneaking suspicions that the metadata provided for a load pipes should have non-zero lengths. Use the Transient option to quickly investigate a batch to validate this hypothesis.

Sessions store the results and offer the ability to refine theories, filtering out the extraneous data to arrive at the core. Those same pipes should only be using supported units, using sessions to run each filtering operation.