Single Table Inheritance

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. In .NET Framework, it is called the Discriminator column.

See also

• Object-relational mapping
• ActiveRecord (Rails)

References

External links

• Single Table Inheritance
• Single Table Inheritance in Yii