mysql - How to do Inheritance Modeling in Relational Databases?

Question

My question is regarding Inheritance modeling in Relational Database Systems. I have canonical data model and in that I have some fields related to pricing of product inheriting certain attributes from product table and I want to model this inheritance in MySQL relational database and so,

"How can we do Inheritance Modeling in Relational Databases ?"

Thanks.

Answer 1

Martin Fowler discusses this extensively in his book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture book. Get this book and look into:

1. Single Table Inheritance

2. Class Table Inheritance

3. Concrete Table Inheritance

The Website should give you some idea. You might also want to read the section on inheritance mappers. Each of the different approaches have their pros and cons so choose wisely.