Mapping an Inheritance Hierarchy
So far in this chapter, you have seen how LINQ to SQL has been used to map entity classes to database tables, in a one-to-one fashion. There are times, however, when constraining an entity model to a flat hierarchy can feel too restrictive, and you may want to use inheritance in your entity model. This is possible with LINQ to SQL using single table inheritance.
When multiple classes of a hierarchy are stored within the same table, this is called single table inheritance. It works by dedicating a column within the table to represent the type of the particular entity class.
Although this approach decreases the level of normalization in a database, it can be an effective approach for entity classes that have a ...
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