Let's create two classes. The capitals class contains state capitals which are also cities. Naturally, the capitals class should inherit from cities. CREATE TABLE cities ( name text, population float, altitude int -- (in ft) ); CREATE TABLE capitals ( state char2 ) INHERITS (cities); In this case, an instance of capitals inherits all attributes (name, population, and altitude) from its parent, cities. The type of the attribute name is text, a native Postgres type for variable length ASCII strings. The type of the attribute population is float, a native Postgres type for double precision floating point numbers. State capitals have an extra attribute, state, that shows their state. In Postgres, a class can inherit from zero or more other classes, and a query can reference either all instances of a class or all instances of a class plus all of its descendants. The inheritance hierarchy is a actually a directed acyclic graph. For example, the following query finds all the cities that are situated at an attitude of 500ft or higher: SELECT name, altitude FROM cities WHERE altitude > 500; +----------+----------+ |name | altitude | +----------+----------+ |Las Vegas | 2174 | +----------+----------+ |Mariposa | 1953 | +----------+----------+ On the other hand, to find the names of all cities, including state capitals, that are located at an altitude over 500ft, the query is: SELECT c.name, c.altitude FROM cities* c WHERE c.altitude > 500; which returns: +----------+----------+ |name | altitude | +----------+----------+ |Las Vegas | 2174 | +----------+----------+ |Mariposa | 1953 | +----------+----------+ |Madison | 845 | +----------+----------+ Here the * after cities indicates that the query should be run over cities and all classes below cities in the inheritance hierarchy. Many of the commands that we have already discussed -- select, update and delete -- support this * notation, as do others, like alter.