hibernate Performance tuning Use composition instead of inheritance

Example

Hibernate has some strategies of inheritance. The JOINED inheritance type do a JOIN between the child entity and parent entity.

The problem with this approach is that Hibernate always bring the data of all involved tables in the inheritance.

Per example, if you have the entities Bicycle and MountainBike using the JOINED inheritance type:

@Entity
@Inheritance(strategy = InheritanceType.JOINED)
public abstract class Bicycle {

}

And:

@Entity
@Inheritance(strategy = InheritanceType.JOINED)
public class MountainBike extends Bicycle {

}

Any JPQL query that hit MountainBike will brings the Bicycle data, creating a SQL query like:

select mb.*, b.* from MountainBike mb JOIN Bicycle b ON b.id = mb.id WHERE ...

If you have another parent for Bicycle (like Transport, per example), this above query will brings the data from this parent too, doing an extra JOIN.

As you can see, this is a kind of EAGER mapping too. You don't have the choice to bring only the data of the MountainBike table using this inheritance strategy.

The best for performance is use composition instead of inheritance.

To accomplish this, you can mapping the MountainBike entity to have a field bicycle:

@Entity
public class MountainBike {

    @OneToOne(fetchType = FetchType.LAZY)
    private Bicycle bicycle;

}

And Bicycle:

@Entity
public class Bicycle {

}

Every query now will bring only the MountainBike data by default.