anonymous wrote : | But I'm not sure you are understanding the problem. | I perfectly agree: I don't understand your problem. That's why I said I think your ERM is broken. Your ERM should have some explanatory structure to tell people what you are doing. If you have just stores and no items (Why is there an ITEM_ID then?) in your ERM then just map everthing to a plain simple table. I'm not saying that there might not be perfectly good reasons to distribute things over different tables - especially if you do have to support some legacy application. But unless you describe what exactly it is you are trying to achieve, everthing is just guessing... Regards Felix View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4033849#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...