Single Table Inheritance

[eluser]sophistry[/eluser]
a quick look at the rails docs and examples tells me that this is not ORM - it is simply using one table to do the work of two or more tables. among other things, it's a way of handling heirarchical data (managers and employees are both people but using one table for them makes expressing their relationship hard - but you don't want two tables because that would mean redundant data, and you don't want to create a properly normalized set of tables because that's too much work ;-)

so, you come up with a shortcut. "single table inheritance" is one shortcut for organizing and giving the code framework access to a simple inheritance architecture in a database schema.

there have been multiple threads on this subject and related topics. use your keywords.

Thunder uk's Nested Sets is an option if you like the nested sets approach to organizing this type of data.

for general ORM there is the Rails Inspired: Rails style model interactions

there may be more... hope that helps inspire you to find/create more! this site is HUGE. - oh and the wiki.