Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Items tagged datasette in Jun

Filters: Month: Jun × datasette × Sorted by date


Weeknotes: Parquet in Datasette Lite, various talks, more LLM hacking

I’ve fallen a bit behind on my weeknotes. Here’s a catchup for the last few weeks.

[... 769 words]

Vector Search. Amjith Ramanujam provides a very thorough tutorial on implementing vector similarity search using SentenceTransformers embeddings (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) executed using sqlite-utils, then served via datasette-sqlite-vss and deployed using Fly. # 2nd June 2023, 5:02 am

Joining CSV files in your browser using Datasette Lite

I added a new feature to Datasette Lite—my version of Datasette that runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly (previously): you can now use it to load one or more CSV files by URL, and then run SQL queries against them—including joins across data from multiple files.

[... 546 words]

Weeknotes: datasette-socrata, and the last 10%...

... takes 90% of the work. I continue to work towards a preview of the new Datasette Cloud, and keep finding new “just one more things” to delay inviting in users.

[... 1214 words]

Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud ready to preview

I made an absolute ton of progress building Datasette Cloud on Fly this week, and also had a bunch of fun playing with GPT-3.

[... 370 words]

Weeknotes: sqlite-utils updates, Datasette and asgi-csrf, open-sourcing VIAL

Some work on sqlite-utils, asgi-csrf, a Datasette alpha and we open-sourced VIAL.

[... 662 words]

A Datasette tutorial in Portuguese. Nicolás Linares put together this Datasette tutorial in Portuguese, including an explanation of the project, how to get it up and running on a laptop, how to use it to explore and facet data, how to use plugins (including datasette-vega and datasette-cluster-map) and how to publish data using Vercel. I ran this through Google Translate and I can confirm that it’s a really well constructed tutorial—fantastic to see material like this starting to emerge in languages other than English. # 25th June 2021, 10:57 pm

Weeknotes: New releases across nine different projects

A new release and security patch for Datasette, plus releases of sqlite-utils, datasette-auth-passwords, django-sql-dashboard, datasette-upload-csvs, xml-analyser, datasette-placekey, datasette-mask-columns and db-to-sqlite.

[... 861 words]

Reflected cross-site scripting issue in Datasette (via) Here’s the GitHub security advisory I published for the XSS hole in Datasette. The fix is available in versions 0.57 and 0.56.1, both released today. # 5th June 2021, 11:14 pm

Datasette 0.57. Released today, Datasette 0.57 has new options for controlling which columns are visible on a table page, a way to show more than the default 30 facet results, a whole bunch of smaller improvements and a fix for a severe cross-site scripting security vulnerability. # 5th June 2021, 11:12 pm

Weeknotes: Docker architectures, sqlite-utils 3.7, nearly there with Datasette 0.57

This week I learned a whole bunch about using Docker to emulate different architectures, released sqlite-utils 3.7 and made a ton of progress towards the almost-ready-to-ship Datasette 0.57.

[... 1081 words]

Weeknotes: cookiecutter templates, better plugin documentation, sqlite-generate

I spent this week spreading myself between a bunch of smaller projects, and finally getting familiar with cookiecutter. I wrote about my datasette-plugin cookiecutter template earlier in the week; here’s what else I’ve been working on.

[... 703 words]

datasette-block-robots. Another little Datasette plugin: this one adds a /robots.txt page with “Disallow: /” to block all indexing of a Datasette instance from respectable search engine crawlers. I built this in less than ten minutes from idea to deploy to PyPI thanks to the datasette-plugin cookiecutter template. # 23rd June 2020, 3:28 am

A cookiecutter template for writing Datasette plugins

Datasette’s plugin system is one of the most interesting parts of the entire project. As I explained to Matt Asay in this interview, the great thing about plugins is that Datasette can gain new functionality overnight without me even having to review a pull request. I just need to get more people to write them!

[... 914 words]

Weeknotes: Datasette alphas for testing new plugin hooks

A relatively quiet week this week, compared to last week’s massive push to ship Datasette 0.44 with authentication, permissions and writable canned queries. I can now ship alpha releases, such as today’s Datasette 0.45a1, which means I can preview new plugin features before they are completely ready and stable.

[... 728 words]

Datasette: A Developer, a Shower and a Data-Inspired Moment (via) Matt Asay interviewed me over Zoom last month. This captures a lot of my thinking around open source really well: “Datasette is aggressively open source for a bunch of reasons. Most of them are very selfish reasons.” # 18th June 2020, 11:32 pm

How much can you learn from just two columns?

Derek Willis shared an intriguing dataset this morning: a table showing every Twitter account followed by an official GOP congressional Twitter account.

[... 951 words]

Datasette 0.44: The annotated release notes

I just released Datasette 0.44 to PyPI. With 128 commits since 0.43 this is the biggest release in a long time—and likely the last major release of new features before Datasette 1.0.

[... 1648 words]

Weeknotes, I guess

What a week. Hard to work up the enthusiasm to write about what I’ve been working on.

[... 314 words]

Porting Datasette to ASGI, and Turtles all the way down

This evening I finally closed a Datasette issue that I opened more than 13 months ago: #272: Port Datasette to ASGI. A few notes on why this is such an important step for the project.

[... 1082 words]

datasette-render-binary (via) Yet another tiny Datasette plugin. This one attempts to render binary data in a slightly more readable fashion—it shows ASCII characters as they are, and shows all other data as monospace octets. Useful as a tool for exploring new unfamiliar databases as it makes it easier to spot if a binary column may contain a decipherable binary format. # 9th June 2019, 4:22 pm

datasette-bplist (via) It turns out an OS X laptop is positively crammed with SQLite databases, and many of them contain values that are data structures encoded using Apple’s binary plist format. datasette-bplist is my new plugin to help explore those files: it provides a display hook for rendering their contents, and a custom bplist_to_json() SQL function which can be used to extract and query information that is embedded in those values. The README includes tips on how to pull interesting EXIF data out of the SQLite database that sits behind Apple Photos. # 9th June 2019, 1:26 am

datasette-vega (via) I wrote a visualization plugin for Datasette that uses the excellent Vega “visualization grammar” library to provide bar, line and scatter charts configurable against any Datasette table or SQL query. # 29th June 2018, 3 pm

Query Parquet files in SQLite. Colin Dellow built a SQLite virtual table extension that lets you query Parquet files directly using SQL. Parquet is interesting because it’s a columnar format that dramatically reduces the space needed to store tables with lots of duplicate column data—most CSV files, for example. Colin reports being able to shrink a 1291 MB CSV file from the Canadian census to an equivalent Parquet file weighing just 42MB (3% of the original)—then running a complex query against the data in just 60ms. I’d love to see someone get this extension working with Datasette. # 24th June 2018, 7:44 pm

Datasette 0.23: CSV, SpatiaLite and more (via) The big new feature in 0.23 is CSV export: any Datasette table or query can now be exported as CSV, including the option to get all matching rows in one giant CSV file taking advantage of Python 3 async and Datasette’s efficient keyset pagination. Also in this release: improved support for SpatiaLite and various JSON API improvements including the ability to expand foreign key labels in JSON and CSV responses. # 18th June 2018, 3:34 pm