Working with the table per class hierarchy strategy of inheritance

Java is an object-oriented programming language, and while working with the object-oriented paradigm, one thing comes to our mind: inheritance. We form a real-world scenario using IS A and HAS A relationships. Inheritance is supported by many languages, but relational databases are unable to understand the relationship of inheritance. Hibernate provides a way to map real-time relationships to the database.

Hibernate provides multiple strategies to achieve such a relationship for relational databases. There are three inheritance mapping strategies defined in hibernate:

• Table per class hierarchy

• Table per subclass

• Table per concrete class

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will take a look at table per class hierarchy.

Here, we will create a new data structure that will help you understand the inheritance strategy.

Consider a class, Employee. We will extend the Employee class into two subclasses—PermanentEmployee and ContractualEmployee...