Single Table Inheritance
Appearance
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 hierarchy the object belongs to[1]. In Ruby on Rails the field in the table called 'type' identifies the name of the class.
See also
References
- ^ Martin Fowler Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (2003), p. 278