Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Entries tagged sqlite

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Drawing shapes on a map to query a SpatiaLite database (and other weeknotes)

This week I built a Datasette plugin that lets you query a database by drawing shapes on a map!

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Weeknotes: A flurry of not-quite-finished features

My Christmas present to myself this year was to allow myself to spend a week working on stuff I found interesting, rather than sticking to the most important things. This may have been a mistake: it’s left me with a flurry of interesting but not-quite-finished features.

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Building a search engine for datasette.io

This week I added a search engine to datasette.io, using the search indexing tool I’ve been building for Dogsheep.

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Building an Evernote to SQLite exporter

I’ve been using Evernote for over a decade, and I’ve long wanted to export my data from it so I can do interesting things with it.

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Weeknotes: software carpentry, compiling modules for SQLite

This week I completed the Software Carpentry instructor training course, added two foundational features to sqlite-utils and learned how to compile modules for SQLite.

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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.

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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.

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Weeknotes: datasette-dump, sqlite-backup, talks

I spent some time this week digging into Python’s sqlite3 internals. I also gave two talks and recorded a third, due to air at PyGotham in October.

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Weeknotes: Installing Datasette with Homebrew, more GraphQL, WAL in SQLite

This week I’ve been working on making Datasette easier to install, plus wide-ranging improvements to the Datasette GraphQL plugin.

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GraphQL in Datasette with the new datasette-graphql plugin

This week I’ve mostly been building datasette-graphql, a plugin that adds GraphQL query support to Datasette.

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Fun with binary data and SQLite

This week I’ve been mainly experimenting with binary data storage in SQLite. sqlite-utils can now insert data from binary files, and datasette-media can serve content over HTTP that originated as binary BLOBs in a database file.

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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.

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Using SQL to find my best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos

According to the Apple Photos internal SQLite database, this is the most aesthetically pleasing photograph I have ever taken of a pelican:

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Weeknotes: Datasette 0.41, photos breakthroughs

Shorter weeknotes this week, because my main project for the week warrants a detailed write-up on its own (coming soon... update 21st May here it is).

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Weeknotes: Datasette 0.39 and many other projects

This week’s theme: Well, I’m not going anywhere. So a ton of progress to report on various projects.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Writes

As discussed previously, the biggest hole in Datasette’s feature set at the moment involves writing to the database.

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Things I learned about shapefiles building shapefile-to-sqlite

The latest in my series of x-to-sqlite tools is shapefile-to-sqlite. I learned a whole bunch of things about the ESRI shapefile format while building it.

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sqlite-utils 2.0: real upserts

I just released version 2.0 of my sqlite-utils library/CLI tool to PyPI.

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Logging to SQLite using ASGI middleware

I had some fun playing around with ASGI middleware and logging during our flight back to England for the holidays.

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Tracking PG&E outages by scraping to a git repo

PG&E have cut off power to several million people in northern California, supposedly as a precaution against wildfires.

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Weeknotes: Dogsheep

Having figured out my Stanford schedule, this week I started getting back into the habit of writing some code.

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Weeknotes: Design thinking for journalists, genome-to-sqlite, datasette-atom

I haven’t had much time for code this week: we’ve had a full five day workshop at JSK with Tran Ha (a JSK alumni) learning how to apply Design Thinking to our fellowship projects and generally to challenges facing journalism.

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Weeknotes: ONA19, twitter-to-sqlite, datasette-rure

I’ve decided to start writing weeknotes for the duration of my JSK fellowship. Here goes!

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sqlite-utils: a Python library and CLI tool for building SQLite databases

sqlite-utils is a combination Python library and command-line tool I’ve been building over the past six months which aims to make creating new SQLite databases as quick and easy as possible.

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Exploring search relevance algorithms with SQLite

SQLite isn’t just a fast, high quality embedded database: it also incorporates a powerful full-text search engine in the form of the FTS4 and FTS5 extensions. You’ve probably used these a bunch of times already: many iOS, Android and desktop applications use SQLite under-the-hood and use it to implement their built-in search.

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The interesting ideas in Datasette

Datasette (previously) is my open source tool for exploring and publishing structured data. There are a lot of ideas embedded in Datasette. I realized that I haven’t put many of them into writing.

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Notes from my appearance on the Changelog podcast

After I spoke at Zeit Day SF last weekend I sat down with Adam Stacoviak to record a 25 minute segment for episode 296 of the Changelog podcast, talking about Datasette. We covered a lot of ground!

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Exploring the UK Register of Members Interests with SQL and Datasette

Ever wondered which UK Members of Parliament get gifted the most helicopter rides? How about which MPs have been given Christmas hampers by the Sultan of Brunei? (David Cameron, William Hague and Michael Howard apparently). Here’s how to dig through the Register of Members Interests using SQL and Datasette.

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Analyzing my Twitter followers with Datasette

I decided to do some ad-hoc analsis of my social network on Twitter this afternoon… and since everything is more fun if you bundle it up into a SQLite database and publish it to the internet I performed the analysis using Datasette.

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Building a location to time zone API with SpatiaLite, OpenStreetMap and Datasette

Given a latitude and longitude, how can we tell what time zone that point lies within? Here’s how I built a simple JSON API to answer that question, using a combination of data from OpenStreetMap, the SpatiaLite extension for SQLite and my Datasette API tool.

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