I'd like to have multiple ways of accessing the data from a set of tables. Basically, I want read-only access to subsets of the data in tables, with occasional write or update access to the full data. Are my only way of doing this with Hibernate to either define database views that eliminate the extra columns in the database for the (reduced) read-only subsets, or split the tables up so there's a separate table for each subset?

It looks like Hibernate insists on having a property for each column of the table. This makes sense for persistence purposes, but it'd be great if it allowed subsetting for read-only access.

Eh??

Why?

Whoops, looks like I had an extra property left in my mapping file. Sorry for the confusion. None of the examples I'd looked at showed using only a subset of columns, so I wasn't sure if this was supported.