Abstract: An apparatus, program product, and method of managing entities in an object-oriented environment permit the selective inheritance of parameters or fields from parent entities and into child entities responsive to persistent indications of the inheritability of such parameters or fields stored in a non-volatile memory. Further, in many implementations, basing a determination of inheritability on such persistent information permits inheritance to be selectively restricted for a parameter or field without requiring any changes to the database schema for a database that controls access to the parent and child entities.