Extending Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management Cookbook - Second Edition

How it works...

Table inheritance is not implemented as physical data structures as we might assume. The natural presumption of how this works is that each child table we create is represented as a physical table in the SQL Server and that there is some logical mechanism that joins them together in the application. In fact, there is only one physical table, and the fields from all the tables are stored in this table. The separation is logical and is a useful way to abstract data into logical entities.

We can see that when we issue a SELECT * FROM <BaseTable> in a SQL Server query window, we get all the fields in one, which implies that all the field names must be unique across the table set.

This leaves the question of why the child tables ...