Ayende Rahien have posted 13 blog posts describing the different NHibernate mappings in detail with examples. Ayende is one of the contributors to NHibernate, the creator of NHibernate Profiler and have been using NHibernate for many years.
Although the different ways of mapping a class to the database are individually well documented in the NHibernate documentation, the different usage scenarios is not always obvious.
Currently Ayende has covered the following mappings:
- Property
- Component
- Many-to-one
- Inheritance
- Dynamic component
- Set
- Concurrency
- Database Object
- Named Queries
- One-to-one
- Join
- Any
- Many-to-any
As he goes through each of the above mappings he touch on many smaller details and usage patterns not know to all users of NHibernate. Examples being how to handle inheritance, map value objects (from Domain-Driven Design), merging several tables into one class or to create associations that’s just not possible to do in a relational database.
The same posts are also found at the NHibernate Forge blog, which is the “official new home for the NHibernate community”.