SmallVille

A collection of SQLAlchemy models and scripts to create a small-scale model for a society.

Design goals

• Creating a database to model aspects of a small society, as a source for SQL query exploration;
• A simple set of ORM classes to model tables, and explore individual objects interactively.

Requirements

To play along at home, you'll need the following:

• Python 3 (developed against py3.6)
• Postgresql (developed against 10)

Installation

To start using SmallVille, the easiest way is to clone this repository and install the package into a fresh Python virtualenv. This keeps it separate from other system Python packages and avoids requiring elevated permissions. The following commands will clone the project and install it (assuming recent Ubuntu linux):

git clone https://github.com/edelooff/smallville.git
cd smallville
virtualenv -p python3 env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -e .

Creating the database

The seed script will connect to a database named smallville as the current user, and assume to be able to drop/create tables in it. The steps below will create a database and set the owner to the current user. They're assuming a Ubuntu environment, but should be mostly portable:

sudo -u postgres createdb smallville -O $(whoami)

Running the seed script

Once the database is created, the seed script can be used to populate it. For this, activate the virtualenv, run the seed script and either start a Python session to interact using SQLAlchemy, or connect using psql.

cd /path/to/smallville
source env/bin/activate
python scripts/seed.py
psql smallville