Wednesday, 23rd September 2020
Executing advanced ALTER TABLE operations in SQLite
SQLite’s ALTER TABLE has some significant limitations: it can’t drop columns (UPDATE: that was fixed in SQLite 3.35.0 in March 2021), it can’t alter NOT NULL status, it can’t change column types. Since I spend a lot of time with SQLite these days I’ve written some code to fix this—both from Python and as a command-line utility.
[... 689 words]Refactoring databases with sqlite-utils extract
Yesterday I described the new sqlite-utils transform mechanism for applying SQLite table transformations that go beyond those supported by ALTER TABLE. The other new feature in sqlite-utils 2.20 builds on that capability to allow you to refactor a database table by extracting columns into separate tables. I’ve called it sqlite-utils extract.