Java Persistence with Hibernate

5.4. Summary

In this chapter, you learned how inheritance hierarchies of entities can be mapped to the database with the four basic inheritance mapping strategies: table per concrete class with implicit polymorphism, table per concrete class with unions, table per class hierarchy, and the normalized table per subclass strategy. You've seen how these strategies can be mixed for a particular hierarchy and when each strategy is most appropriate.

We also elaborated on the Hibernate entity and value type distinction, and how the Hibernate mapping type system works. You used various built-in types and wrote your own custom types by utilizing the Hibernate extension points such as UserType and ParameterizedType.

Table 5.5 shows a summary you can use ...