I'm building an application where a potentially large number of derived classes are generated.

Which (if any) of the inheritance options is the most scalable in terms of supporting a large number persistent classes derived from a single base class?

The most convenient (coding wise) would appear to be "Table per class" using <joined-subclass> and with no discriminator - since this would use an implicit discriminator. However, I suspect that this would won't scale very well because a large number of joined tables need to be examined to determine the type of a subclass instance. Right?

So which option would you recommend?

Thanks for Hibernate!
Tony.