Single Table Inheritance
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Single table inheritance is a way to emulate object-oriented inheritance in a Relational_database. When mapping from a database table to an object in an object-oriented language, a field in the database identifies what class in the hierachy the object belongs to[1]. In Ruby on Rails the field in the table called 'type' identifies the name of the class.
See also Object-relational mapping
- ^ Martin Fowler Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, 2003