I have two maps in a class that I'd like to map to one table.
The both maps are about i18n'zed properties, so that I'm trying to map:


Is there a way to have this persisted to the same table with such a schema:


Thanks,
Alex

Are the two maps going to have the same set of keys? If you're going to end up with identical sets of keys, then I think what you want to do is to add one map with both columns in your hibernate mapping, then use that map to back two "virtual" maps in your java object. This will reduce the number of selects and the amount of memory required. It does require writing two small implementations of AbstractMap, but that's not hard.

If the two maps are significantly different (one set of languages has labels and another disjoint set has descriptions), then what you propose will work fine.

Well what I propose does actually NOT work.
On insert, hibernate tries to insert 2 rows, one with the label and one with the description for the same map-key.
The two maps should always contain the same keys. Only I wanted to have description lazy, since it shouldn't always be needed.
But I thought that I'll need to go for something like a single backing map...
Thanks for the reply, while I had hoped that some kind of "funky" mapping could have had solved my problem with a hbm-only solution...
Alex