title: C++ class design from database schema
body: <p>I am writing a perl script to parse a mysql database schema and create C++ classes when necessary.  My question is a pretty easy one, but us something I haven't really done before and don't know common practice.  Any object of any of classes created will need to have "get" methods to populate this information.  So my questions are twofold:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Does it make sense to call all of the get methods in the constructor so that the object has data right away?  Some classes will have a lot of them, so as needed might make sense too.  I have two constrcutors now.  One that populates the data and one that does not.</li>
  <li>Should I also have a another "get" method that retrieves the object's copy of the data rather that the db copy.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I could go both ways on #1 and am leaning towards yes on #2.  Any advice, pointers would be much appreciated.  </p>