Hi All!

This is my first post on this forum (I've started with the book forum) so forgive if this is an age-old question, but I wanted to know how Hibernate can help me in doing some more complex mappings as in:

1. From several classes (e.g. in an hierarchy) to one database table; this can be decided for performance issues and is very realistic;

2. From one class to several tables; which is more a theoretical possibility, maybe not so much useful in practice.

Tutorials and examples I have seen so far always present simple 1:1 mapping examples.

A second (related) question is: how to derive a mapping from a UML Class diagram (perhaps serialized into an XMI file), instead of specific Java classes (or even annotated classes)?