in a web enviroment I have a User object that needs to keep track of things like 'Favorite Music Types' and 'Genders I'd like to Meet' these options are all selected via checkboxes so they can select all, none or some.

right now ive got a many-to-many association between my User and MusicType objects and many-to-many between User and GendersToMeet objects (collection of Gender objects) , both MusicType and GendersToMeet have simple id/name propertys, so my question is, is this overkill?

my User objects need to keep track of lots of different info like this so im ending up with lots of these many-to-many collections, just wondering if theres a simpler alternative?

someone help me out here :)

Perhaps a persistent enum would suit better?

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/reference/html/or-mapping.html#or-mapping-s2-3

I think RDBMS is a overkill for this use case, you can store this kind of data in Cookies.

hmm no i dont think cookies is a good place to store this data, i need to be able to run report against the DB too, like whats favorite music type is FOOBAR

I hope the "storing in cookies" was a joke. :)

You can model this with component, collections of components or even enumeration classes. There are many ways to avoid full entity realtionships, but this is more in the scope of object-oriented domain models, not Hibernate.