[Tutor] question about "hiding" a function/method in a class

[Mike Hansen]

Alan G wrote:
>>I haven't done much OO in Python yet. For various web apps we write,
> 
> we usually
> 
>>write up a DB schema in a spreadsheet.
> 
> 
> Wow! How exactly do you represent a schema in a spreadsheet?
> I confess I cannot conceive of such a thing. Can you send a
> representative sample to illustrate?
> 

Maybe it's not a "schema" exactly.

|Table Name|Fields  |Type   |Size|Primary Key|Not Null|Unique|Foreign Key| ...
|areas     |area_id |serial |    |x          |x       |x     |           |
|          |area    |varchar|80  |           |x       |x     |           |
|          |enabled |boolean|    |           |x       |      |           |

|'s represent each cell. It's just a way to organize your thoughts, and have 
something a little more readable than an SQ script for a DB schema. There's been 
less than 20 tables in a database for most of these applications that we write. 
It's clear enough to see the relations(there's another column references).

> 
>>create the tables in the database. I thought it would be neat to
> 
> save the
> 
>>spreadsheet as a csv file and have python write the sql script. So I
> 
> started to
> 
>>write the Python program.
> 
> 
> You do know that there are lots of ERD programs that allow you to draw
> the schema as an ERD and generate the SQL DDL directly? In fact even
> Visio
> can do that.
> 
> Alan G.
> 

Can you point me to some Open Source/Free ERD programs that work with 
Postgre?(I'll google after I send this message.) I'd certainly would like to 
look at ways to do this better. Last time I looked at Visio which was Visio 
2000, the ERD stuff cost extra and was very unstable.

Mike