Simon Willison’s Weblog

sqlite-utils 2.14 (via) I finally figured out porter stemming with SQLite full-text search today—it turns out it’s as easy as adding tokenize=’porter’ to the CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE statement. So I just shipped sqlite-utils 2.14 with a tokenize= option (plus the ability to insert binary file data from stdin). # 1st August 2020, 9:19 pm

sqlite-utils 2.12 (via) I’ve been experimenting with ways of improving BLOB support in Datasette and sqlite-utils. This new version of sqlite-utils includes a “sqlite-utils insert-files” command, which can recursively crawl directories for files and add their contents to SQLite with configurable columns containing their metadata.

I was inspired by Paul Ford who has been creating multi-GB SQLite databases of images and PDFs. It turns out that when disk space is cheap this is a pretty effective way of working with interesting corpuses of documents and images. # 27th July 2020, 7:36 am

sqlite-generate (via) I wrote this tool today to generate arbitrarily large SQLite databases, for testing purposes. You tell it how many tables, columns and rows you want and it will use the Faker Python library to generate random data and populate the tables with it. # 23rd June 2020, 2:19 am

hacker-news-to-sqlite (via) The latest in my Dogsheep series of tools: hacker-news-to-sqlite uses the Hacker News API to fetch your comments and submissions from Hacker News and save them to a SQLite database. # 21st March 2020, 4:27 am

geojson-to-sqlite (via) I just put out the first release of geojson-to-sqlite—a CLI tool that can convert GeoJSON files (consisting of a Feature or a set of features in a FeatureCollection) into a table in a SQLite database. If you use the --spatialite option it will initalize the table with SpatiaLite and store the geometries in a spacially indexed geometry field—without that option it stores them as GeoJSON. # 31st January 2020, 6:40 am

sqlite-transform. I released a new CLI tool today: sqlite-transform, which lets you run “transformations” against a SQLite database. I built it out of frustration of constantly running into CSV files that use horrible American date formatting—the “sqlite-transform parsedatetime my.db mytable col1” command runs dateutil’s parser against those columns and replaces them with a nice, sortable ISO formatted timestamp. I’ve also added a “sqlite-transform lambda” command that lets you specify Python code directly on the command-line that should be used to transform every value in a specified column. # 4th November 2019, 2:41 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

sqlite-utils 1.11. Amjith Ramanujam contributed an excellent new feature to sqlite-utils, which I’ve now released as part of version 1.11. Previously you could enable SQLite full-text-search on a table using the .enable_fts() method (or the “sqlite-utils enable-fts” CLI command) but it wouldn’t reflect future changes to the table—you had to use populate_fts() any time you inserted new records. Thanks to Amjith you can now pass create_triggers=True (or --create-triggers) to cause sqlite-utils to automatically add triggers that keeps the FTS index up-to-date any time a row is inserted, updated or deleted from the table. # 3rd September 2019, 1:05 am

Working with many-to-many relationships in sqlite-utils (via) I just released sqlite-utils 1.9 with syntactic sugar support for creating many-to-many relationships for records stored in SQLite databases. # 4th August 2019, 3:57 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

Convert Locations.kml (pulled from an iPhone backup) to SQLite. I’ve been playing around with data from my iPhone using the iPhone Backup Extractor app and one of the things it exports for you is a Locations.kml file full of location history data. I wrote a tiny script using Python’s ElementTree XMLPullParser to efficiently iterate through the Placemarks and yield them as dictionaries, which I then batch-inserted into sqlite-utils to create a SQLite database. # 14th June 2019, 12:45 am

sqlite-utils 1.0. I just released sqlite-utils 1.0, with a couple of handy new features over 0.14: it can now automatically add columns to a database table if you attempt to insert data which doesn’t quite fit (using alter=True in the Python API or the --alter option to the “sqlite-utils insert” command). It also has the ability to output nested JSON column values on the command-line using the new --json-cols option. This is the first project I’ve marked as a 1.0 release in a very long time—I’ll be sticking to semver for this project from now on, bumping the major version only in the case of a backwards incompatible change. # 25th May 2019, 1:20 am