How do you effectively model inheritance in a database?

Solution 1:

There are several ways to model inheritance in a database. Which you choose depends on your needs. Here are a few options:

Table-Per-Type (TPT)

Each class has its own table. The base class has all the base class elements in it, and each class which derives from it has its own table, with a primary key which is also a foreign key to the base class table; the derived table's class contains only the different elements.

So for example:

class Person {
    public int ID;
    public string FirstName;
    public string LastName;
}

class Employee : Person {
    public DateTime StartDate;
}

Would result in tables like:

table Person
------------
int id (PK)
string firstname
string lastname

table Employee
--------------
int id (PK, FK)
datetime startdate

Table-Per-Hierarchy (TPH)

There is a single table which represents all the inheritance hierarchy, which means several of the columns will probably be sparse. A discriminator column is added which tells the system what type of row this is.

Given the classes above, you end up with this table:

table Person
------------
int id (PK)
int rowtype (0 = "Person", 1 = "Employee")
string firstname
string lastname
datetime startdate

For any rows which are rowtype 0 (Person), the startdate will always be null.

Table-Per-Concrete (TPC)

Each class has its own fully formed table with no references off to any other tables.

Given the classes above, you end up with these tables:

table Person
------------
int id (PK)
string firstname
string lastname

table Employee
--------------
int id (PK)
string firstname
string lastname
datetime startdate

Solution 2:

Proper database design is nothing like proper object design.

If you are planning to use the database for anything other than simply serializing your objects (such as reports, querying, multi-application use, business intelligence, etc.) then I do not recommend any kind of a simple mapping from objects to tables.

Many people think of a row in a database table as an entity (I spent many years thinking in those terms), but a row is not an entity. It is a proposition. A database relation (i.e., table) represents some statement of fact about the world. The presence of the row indicates the fact is true (and conversely, its absence indicates the fact is false).

With this understanding, you can see that a single type in an object-oriented program may be stored across a dozen different relations. And a variety of types (united by inheritance, association, aggregation, or completely unaffiliated) may be partially stored in a single relation.

It is best to ask yourself, what facts do you want to store, what questions are you going to want answers to, what reports do you want to generate.

Once the proper DB design is created, then it is a simple matter to create queries/views that allow you to serialize your objects to those relations.

Example:

In a hotel booking system, you may need to store the fact that Jane Doe has a reservation for a room at the Seaview Inn for April 10-12. Is that an attribute of the customer entity? Is it an attribute of the hotel entity? Is it a reservation entity with properties that include customer and hotel? It could be any or all of those things in an object oriented system. In a database, it is none of those things. It is simply a bare fact.

To see the difference, consider the following two queries. (1) How many hotel reservations does Jane Doe have for next year? (2) How many rooms are booked for April 10 at the Seaview Inn?

In an object-oriented system, query (1) is an attribute of the customer entity, and query (2) is an attribute of the hotel entity. Those are the objects that would expose those properties in their APIs. (Though, obviously the internal mechanisms by which those values are obtained may involve references to other objects.)

In a relational database system, both queries would examine the reservation relation to get their numbers, and conceptually there is no need to bother with any other "entity".

Thus, it is by attempting to store facts about the world—rather than attempting to store entities with attributes—that a proper relational database is constructed. And once it is properly designed, then useful queries that were undreamt of during the design phase can be easily constructed, since all the facts needed to fulfill those queries are in their proper places.