Does the Table per subclass, using a discriminator strategy allow the properties in the subclass to be lazily fetched? In the join element, I can set the “fetch” property to “join” (which does an outer join on all the sub tables) or to “select” (which does an immediate select for each of the sub tables). However, what I really want is the select on the sub table to only happen after the first time I access a property in the subclass.

I admittedly haven’t looked at “lazy property fetching”, but that doesn’t really sound like what I want. I want all the properties in a subclass to be populated, but only after I access the first property in the subclass. Thus, if for a particular session I only access properties in the parent class, I don't have to do all the joins/selects on the sub tables.