How to do Inheritance Modeling in Relational Databases?
If you just want to look at some web articles instead of reading a book, you can find some good articles by Googling on:
Generalization Specialization Relational Modeling
The gen-spec pattern covers a lot of the same ground that inheritance does in OOP environments.
If you google on
Generalization Specialization Object Modeling
you'll get a whole new batch of articles, most of which mention inheritance explicitly.
There is a design technique that's summarized in the following tag class-table-inheritance under the info tag. This allows you to use subclass tables to "extend" a class table, if you'll allow a strange use of the word "extend". There's some work involved, but it's worth it.
Relational databases don't deal with objects (and, thus, inheritance) - they deal with relationships. What you're really asking is how to map your object structure to your database - and the answer to that is "it depends on your ORM layer".
Take a look at Mapping Objects to Relational Databases: O/R Mapping In Detail article for some details. If you tell us what software stack you're using, you'll likely get a more to-the-point answer.
Look at these articles for some ideas:
Mapping Objects to Relational Databases
Inheritance in O/R Mapping
Martin Fowler discusses this extensively in his book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture book. Get this book and look into:
- Single Table Inheritance
- Class Table Inheritance
- 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.