Simon Willison’s Weblog

sba-loans-covid-19-datasette (via) The treasury department released a bunch of data on the Covid-19 SBA Paycheck Protection Program Loan recipients today—I’ve loaded the most interesting data (the $150,000+ loans) into a Datasette instance. # 7th July 2020, 2:42 am

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

Serving photos locally with datasette-media. datasette-media is a new Datasette plugin which can serve static files from disk in response to a configured SQL query that maps incoming URL parameters to a path to a file. I built it so I could run dogsheep-photos locally on my laptop and serve up thumbnails of images that match particular queries. I’ve added documentation to the dogsheep-photos README explaining how to use datasette-media, datasette-json-html and datasette-template-sql to create custom interfaces onto Apple Photos data on your machine. # 26th May 2020, 3:53 pm

github-to-sqlite 2.2 highlights thread. I released github-to-sqlite 2.2 today with a new “stargazers” command for importing users who have starred one or more specific repositories. This Twitter thread lists highlights of recent releases and links to a live Datasette demo that shows what the tool can do. # 2nd May 2020, 10:16 pm

datasette-publish-fly (via) Fly is a neat new Docker hosting provider with a very tempting pricing model: Just $2.67/month for their smallest always-on instance, and they give each user $10/month in free credit. datasette-publish-fly is the first plugin I’ve written using the publish_subcommand plugin hook, which allows extra hosting providers to be added as publish targets. Install the plugin and you can run “datasette publish fly data.db” to deploy SQLite databases to your Fly account. # 19th March 2020, 3:40 am

datasette-template-sql (via) New Datasette plugin, celebrating the new ability in Datasette 0.32 to have asynchronous custom template functions in Jinja (which was previously blocked by the need to support Python 3.5). The plugin adds a sql() function which can be used to execute SQL queries that are embedded directly in custom templates. # 15th November 2019, 12:59 am

Datasette 0.31. Released today: this version adds compatibility with Python 3.8 and breaks compatibility with Python 3.5. Since Glitch support Python 3.7.3 now I decided I could finally give up on 3.5. This means Datasette can use f-strings now, but more importantly it opens up the opportunity to start taking advantage of Starlette, which makes all kinds of interesting new ASGI-based plugins much easier to build. # 12th November 2019, 6:11 am

SQL Murder Mystery in Datasette (via) “A crime has taken place and the detective needs your help. The detective gave you the  crime scene report, but you somehow lost it. You vaguely remember that the crime  was a murder that occurred sometime on ​Jan.15, 2018 and that it took place in SQL  City. Start by retrieving the corresponding crime scene report from the police  department’s database.”—Really fun game to help exercise your skills with SQL by the NU Knight Lab. I loaded their SQLite database into Datasette so you can play in your browser. # 7th October 2019, 11:37 pm

genome-to-sqlite. I just found out 23andMe let you export your genome as a zipped TSV file, so I wrote a little Python command-line tool to import it into a SQLite database. # 19th September 2019, 3:58 pm

datasette-cors (via) My other Datasette ASGI plugin: this one wraps my asgi-cors project and lets you configure CORS access from a list of domains (or a set of domain wildcards) so you can make JavaScript calls to a Datasette instance from a specific set of other hosts. # 8th July 2019, 4:30 am

datasette-auth-github (via) My first big ASGI plugin for Datasette: datasette-auth-github adds the ability to require users to authenticate against the GitHub OAuth API. You can whitelist specific users, or you can restrict access to members of specific GitHub organizations or teams. While it’s structured as a Datasette plugin it also includes ASGI middleware which can be applied to any ASGI application. # 8th July 2019, 4:28 am

Datasette 0.29 (via) I shipped Datasette 0.29! • ASGI all the way down! Plus a new asgi_wrapper plugin hook letting plugins do all kinds of powerful new things • New mechanism for secret plugin configuration options • Facet by date • ?_through= for joins through m2m tables. Much more. # 8th July 2019, 4:26 am

db-to-sqlite 1.0 release. I’ve released version 1.0 of my db-to-sqlite tool, which lets you create a SQLite database copy of any database supported by SQLAlchemy (I’ve tested it against MySQL and PostgreSQL). The tool has a bunch of new features: you can use --redact to redact specific columns, specify --table multiple times to copy a subset of tables, and the --all option now efficiently adds all foreign keys at the end of the import. The project now has unit tests which run against MySQL and PostgreSQL in Travis CI. Also included in the README: a shell one-liner for creating a local SQLite copy of a remote Heroku Postgres database based on extracting the connection string from a Heroku config environment variable. # 1st July 2019, 1:35 am

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-jq (via) I released another tiny Datasette plugin: datasette-jq registers a single custom SQL function, jq(), which lets you execute the jq expression language against a JSON column (or literal value) to filter and transform the JSON data. The README includes a link to a live demo—it’s a neat way to play with the jq micro-language. # 30th May 2019, 1:52 am

Datasette 0.27 (via) The latest release of Datasette introduces an option to output tables and SQL query results as newline-delimited JSON—plus a new “datasette plugins” command for listing available plugins. # 1st February 2019, 4:39 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

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

Datasette 0.21: New _shape=, new _size=, search within columns. Nothing earth-shattering here but it’s accumulated enough small improvements that it warranted a new release. You can now send ?_shape=array to get back a plain JSON array of results, ?_size=XXX|max to get back a specific number of rows from a table view and ?_search_COLUMN=text to run full-text search against a specific column. # 5th May 2018, 11:25 pm

JSON Escape Text. I built a tiny tool for turning text into an escaped JSON string—I needed it to help create descriptions and canned SQL queries for adding to Datasette’s metadata.json files. # 25th April 2018, 4:13 am

Datasette 0.15: sort by column (via) I’ve released the latest version of Datasette to PyPI. The key new feature is the ability to sort tables by column, using clickable column headers or directly via the new _sort= and _sort_desc= querystring parameters. # 9th April 2018, 5:25 pm

Datasette 0.14: customization edition. I just released the latest version of Datasette with a strong theme of customization: Datasette now supports custom templates and CSS styling hooks, and the metadata format has been expanded to allow per-database and per-table source/license/description information. You can also now define named canned queries which will be packaged up with your data. # 10th December 2017, 1:55 am

Datasettes · simonw/datasette. I’m collecting examples of datasette-powered APIs on the project wiki. # 14th November 2017, 7:39 am

Datasette for Polar Bears. I found a fun dataset of Polar Bear ear tag tracking data put out by the USGS Alaska Science Center and deployed it using datasette in just a couple of minutes—here’s how I did it. # 14th November 2017, 5:41 am

simonw/csvs-to-sqlite. I built a simple tool for bulk converting multiple CSV files into a SQLite database. # 13th November 2017, 6:49 am