J2EE Design Patterns

Name

Table Inheritance Pattern

Goal

Provide a simple mapping between a class hierarchy and a set of database tables.

Participants

Domain object model

Provides an object representation of the data a system must deal with.

Database schema

Provides a method to store and query against the data in the domain object model.

Interactions

Concrete table inheritance

Each concrete class in the domain object model has a corresponding table in the underlying database schema. When the object model is persisted to the database, each object is written to a row in the corresponding table.

Class table inheritance

Each class in the domain object model, whether abstract or concrete, has a corresponding table containing the data items defined in that class. Tables associated with a subclass are linked within the database, via primary key relations, with the table associated with their superclass.