Test-driven software must often drop, create and populate database tables with records before it runs a suite of unit tests. For this reason, the ability to have JPA frameworks -- such as EclipseLink ...

The best way to learn JPA and Hibernate development is to start simple. A developer only needs three things to begin: a JDK, Hibernate and a text editor.

Note that I assume you’ve been introduced to Java persistence with JPA and Hibernate, including how to model entities and relationships using primary keys.

Databases have no notion of inheritance between entities, so JPA providers like Hibernate must provide special features for defining object-oriented inheritance relationships in the database.