I ask because I currently use that strategy when modeling inheritance, but now my company's database people would prefer that I switch to the table-per-subclass mapping strategy (joined-sublcass).

Section 16.2 of the hibernate reference assures me that I'll still get all the polymorphic behavior I want with table-per-subclass, but I figure table-per-class-hierarchy is recommended because of performance issues. And I'd hate to rework the tables of an in-production application just to find out that the performance is unacceptable.


Anyone want to tell me I'm worried over nothing.

-Chuck
.

Well, with joined-subclass you of course get a lot of joins and generally more complex SQL queries. The performance hit should be bearable if you don't make heavy use of subclassing and polymorphism. In the end it all depends on your use case.