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add a CAUTION about overuse of inheritance to docs #10794

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Aug 20, 2025
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add a CAUTION about overuse of inheritance to docs #10794

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9 changes: 9 additions & 0 deletions documentation/src/main/asciidoc/introduction/Mapping.adoc
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Expand Up @@ -168,6 +168,15 @@ is a bad idea, since it's impossible to create a foreign key constraint that tar
// Hibernate doesn't support mixing ``InheritanceType``s within a single entity hierarchy.
// However, it's possible to emulate a mix of `SINGLE_TABLE` and `JOINED` inheritance using the `@SecondaryTable` annotation.

[CAUTION]
====
It's quite easy to overuse inheritance.
We've occasionally seen extreme cases where a `JOINED` inheritance hierarchy includes _hundreds_ of entities, spanning hundreds of tables.
Efficiently querying such a hierarchy is an almost impossible task for Hibernate.
Fortunately, a `JOINED` inheritance relationship can always be remodeled as a <<one-to-one-pk,one-to-one association>>, allowing much more efficient queries.
In general, a single entity inheritance hierarchy should never span more than a few tables, including secondary tables.
====

[[table-mappings]]
=== Mapping to tables

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