You may even map a property of type Map:

<dynamic-component name="userAttributes">
    <property name="foo" column="FOO" type="string"/>
    <property name="bar" column="BAR" type="integer"/>
    <many-to-one name="baz" class="Baz" column="BAZ_ID"/>
</dynamic-component>

The semantics of a <dynamic-component> mapping are identical to <component>. The advantage of this kind of mapping is the ability to determine the actual properties of the bean at deployment time, just by editing the mapping document. Runtime manipulation of the mapping document is also possible, using a DOM parser. Even better, you can access (and change) Hibernate's configuration-time metamodel via the Configuration object.