I am new to Hibernate. I am looking for best practice advices when deleting inheritance implemented by using joined-subclass (table per class).

Description:

Using table per class approach.

An abstract base class, PERSON. A concrete sub-class, EMPLOYEE, of PERSON. Another concrete subclass, SALESPERSON, of EMPLOYEE. Both EMPLOYEE and SALESPERSON use joined-subclass in the mapping file. I understand an employee and a sales person share the same key as a person.

Questions:

How to ONLY delete a sales person without deleting the employee?
How to AUTOMATICALLY delete the sales person when deleting a particular employee? (This is similar to cascade delete but to its subclasses.)

Thank you.

In the same way that you can't change an object's class in Java after it has been instantiated, you wont be able to change your SALESPERSON into an EMPLOYEE.

It seems like your domain model requires some one-to-one mappings rather than joined-subclass.