It has recently become apparent to me that I do not know precisely what a role is in the context of Hibernate mappings. What surprised me even more was that I was unable to find any coherent explanation anywhere on the web. Perhaps it is my google skills not being up to scratch, perhaps it is really a gap in the Hibernate documentation (I looked through 2.1.7 docs). Either way, I would really appreciate a link to an explanation of what roles are and/or a brief synopsis of how they differ from table names and how they are meant to be used.

Thanks in advance.