Chapter 5. Inheritance and custom types

We deliberately didn't talk much about inheritance mapping so far. Mapping a hierarchy of classes to tables can be a complex issue, and we'll present various strategies in this chapter. You'll learn which strategy to choose in a particular scenario.

The Hibernate type system, with all its built-in converters and transformers for Java value-typed properties to SQL datatypes, is the second big topic we discuss in this chapter.

Let's start with the mapping of entity inheritance.