I'm working with an existing badly designed database.

The problem is that some tables aren't normalised and others are over normalised.

I'd rather not continue these errors into my objects (and in any case I wouldn't want to map my objects 1-to-1 my tables even if they were perfectly designed.)

I've skimmed the Hibernat In Action and can't find how I would do this.

What I would like is map one of my classes to 2 tables: both tables are equal parts of the class *not* composite parts. So say my class is Car and one table defines a column "name" and the other table defines a column "colour" I want to be able to map them directly to attributes on the class: name and colour respectively.

The question is: how?

With hibernate 2 this is not possible.

I know about the following options:

- If you have a DB which supports instead of triggers you could create a view and let the triggers handle the insert and update correctly.
- Do the the mapping as the DB dictates. On top of this two mapped classes create a combining Facade which hides the DB desing.
- Have a look at Hibernate 3.

BTW: Option 1 works for non normalized tables as well. Just create 2 views representing the normalized data.

HTH
Ernst

Ah ok. Appreciate the response: sounds like the Facade is the way to go (don't want to migrate to Hibernate3 just yet).

Thanks very much.

Edward