gavin wrote:
The problem is that a query against the superclass returns only attributes of the superclass. Which is the opposite of what you need in ORM. You need all attibutes of all subclasses, padded with nulls.
Although you only mention what I would call 'flat' inheritance (I'm not familiar with the hibernate terms yet) I guess you also mean that even in join-inheritance it's the parent table that points to the rows in the 'descendant' tables and in which of these child tables the rows with the extra data are.
Therefore for all inheritance mechanisms in Hibernate the type is always deducible even from selecting the master table. You're right, the way inheritance is done in postgres just doesn't give this information by simply selecting the parent table. A mapping could be done but would not enjoy good performance and require complicated queries.
Too bad really.
Sebastian