Simon Willison’s Weblog

Introducing sqlite-vss: A SQLite Extension for Vector Search (via) This latest SQLite extension from Alex Garcia is possibly his best yet: it adds FAISS-powered vector similarity search directly to SQLite, enabling fast KNN similarity lookups against a virtual table that feels a lot like SQLite’s own built-in full text search feature. This write-up includes interactive demos using Datasette called from an Observable notebook, running similarity searches against an index of 200,000 news headlines and summaries in less than 50ms. # 10th February 2023, 10:53 pm

Making SQLite extensions pip install-able (via) Alex Garcia figured out how to bundle a compiled SQLite extension in a Python wheel (building different wheels for different platforms) and publish them to PyPI. This is a huge leap forward in terms of the usability of SQLite extensions, which have previously been pretty difficult to actually install and run. Alex also created Datasette plugins that depend on his packages, so you can now “datasette install datasette-sqlite-regex” (or datasette-sqlite-ulid, datasette-sqlite-fastrand, datasette-sqlite-jsonschema) to gain access to his custom SQLite extensions in your Datasette instance. It even works with “datasette publish --install” to deploy to Vercel, Fly.io and Cloud Run. # 6th February 2023, 7:44 pm

datasette-scraper walkthrough on YouTube (via) datasette-scraper is Colin Dellow’s new plugin that turns Datasette into a powerful web scraping tool, with a web UI based on plugin-driven customizations to the Datasette interface. It’s really impressive, and this ten minute demo shows quite how much it is capable of: it can crawl sitemaps and fetch pages, caching them (using zstandard with optional custom dictionaries for extra compression) to speed up subsequent crawls... and you can add your own plugins to extract structured data from crawled pages and save it to a separate SQLite table! # 29th January 2023, 5:23 am

Examples of sites built using Datasette (via) I gave the examples page on the Datasette website a significant upgrade today: it now includes screenshots (taken using shot-scraper) of six projects chosen to illustrate the variety of problems Datasette can be used to tackle. # 29th January 2023, 3:40 am

datasette-granian (via) Granian is a new Python web server—similar to Gunicorn—written in Rust. I built a small plugin that adds a “datasette granian” command starting a Granian server that serves Datasette’s ASGI application, using the same pattern as my existing datasette-gunicorn plugin. # 20th January 2023, 2:12 am

Datasette is my data hammer (via) Jeremia Kimelman—a data journalist at CalMatters in Sacramento—enthuses about how he uses Datasette as his default hammer for all kinds of data projects—in particular how much he appreciates Datasette’s focus on URLs. So nice to see this! # 17th January 2023, 5:23 pm

Datasette Lite: Loading JSON data (via) I added a new feature to Datasette Lite: you can now pass it the URL to a JSON file (hosted on a CORS-compatible hosting provider such as GitHub or GitHub Gists) and it will load that file into a database table for you. It expects an array of objects, but if your file has an object as the root it will search through it looking for the first key that is an array of objects and load those instead. # 18th November 2022, 6:43 pm

Figure out how to serve an AWS Lambda function with a Function URL from a custom subdomain (via) This took me five hours and 77 issue comments to figure out, but I finally managed to serve an AWS Lambda function running Datasette on a custom subdomain with an HTTPS certificate. I was going to write this up as a TIL but I’m exhausted so I decided to share my private notes thread instead. # 3rd October 2022, 12:29 am