title: Hibernate entities without underlying tables
body: <p>I have a really ugly legacy database system that I need to integrate with.  Essentially I'm doing some read only reporting on the system, and I don't want to set up a thousand entities representing each of the tables that I'm working on.  Instead, I'd like to just define an Entity for each of the report-types that I generate (essentially a union of a bunch of columns from different tables), and then let hibernate map from the nasty (many joined, many unioned) sql query to a list of such entities.</p>
  
  <p>The question is: can I create an entity that doesn't have an underlying table, and use a sql statement to populate a list of said entities?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>