INHERITS, yes! But unfortunately, I'm not using Postgres. I've got Oracle 8i, and after searching their docs for "inherit", "derive", "subclass", "under" and "child" I can't find an equivalent keyword. All in all that's not a huge loss though, as we've tried to stay DB agnostic in our SQL to as great a degree as possible.

What are your thoughts on the principle of the matter as far as using joins here though? pg points out below that denormalization for performance is an accepted practice, but this application isn't really going to be hit that hard. Rather I'm concerned more with ease of maintenance and extensibility, working on the assumption that the child tables will expand down the road. Which, upon reflection, favors joins strongly, views a little less so IMO. Hmmm. /me dreams of INHERITS...