Efficiency of Hibernate's table-per-subclass inheritance strategy

Question

I\'m thinking about table layout for a Hibernate-managed class hierarchy, and certainly the table per subclass technique strikes me as the most appropriate in a general sense.

Answer 1

As long as you access your DB only through Hibernate and you either dont have important data or are ready to write a small migration script, you should be able to make the decision about table per subclass / hierarchy quite late in your development process. That's the beauty of an ORM, it abstract the database structure...

On the other hand, I'm a big fan of "prefer composition over inheritance" (Prefer composition over inheritance?) and I am quite dubious that a model with 70 classes over 4-5 levels cannot be simplified ... but I'll let you think for yourself over that one, after all I dont know what probem you are trying to sovle.