Simon Willison’s Weblog

Building a BFT JSON CRDT (via) Jacky Zhao describes their project to build a CRDT library for JSON data in Rust, and includes a thorough explanation of what CRDTs are and how they work. “I write this blog post mostly as a note to my past self, distilling a lot of what I’ve learned since into a blog post I wish I had read before going in”—the best kind of blog post! # 21st November 2022, 7:56 pm

Datasette Lite: Loading JSON data (via) I added a new feature to Datasette Lite: you can now pass it the URL to a JSON file (hosted on a CORS-compatible hosting provider such as GitHub or GitHub Gists) and it will load that file into a database table for you. It expects an array of objects, but if your file has an object as the root it will search through it looking for the first key that is an array of objects and load those instead. # 18th November 2022, 6:43 pm

JSON Changelog with SQLite (via) One of my favourite database challenges is how to track changes to rows over time. This is a neat recipe from 2018 which uses SQLite triggers and the SQLite JSON functions to serialize older versions of the rows and store them in TEXT columns. # 16th November 2022, 3:41 am

RFC 7807: Problem Details for HTTP APIs (via) This RFC has been brewing for quite a while, and is currently in last call (ends 2022-11-03). I’m designing the JSON error messages for Datasette at the moment so this could not be more relevant for me. # 1st November 2022, 3:15 am

dolthub/jsplit (via) Neat Go CLI tool for working with truly gigantic JSON files. This assumes files will be an object with one or more keys that are themselves huge lists of objects—it than extracts those lists out into one or more newline-delimited JSON files (capping their size at 4GB) which are much easier to work with as streams of data. # 6th September 2022, 8:27 pm

Introducing sqlite-lines—a SQLite extension for reading files line-by-line (via) Alex Garcia wrote a brilliant C module for SQLIte which adds functions (and a table-valued function) for efficiently reading newline-delimited text into SQLite. When combined with SQLite’s built-in JSON features this means you can read a huge newline-delimited JSON file into SQLite in a streaming fashion so it doesn’t exhaust memory for a large file. Alex also compiled the extension to WebAssembly, and his post here is an Observable notebook post that lets you exercise the code directly. # 30th July 2022, 7:18 pm

jless (via) A really nice new command-line JSON viewer, written in Rust, created by Paul Julius Martinez. It provides a terminal interface for navigating through large JSON files, including expanding and contracting nested objects and searching for strings or a modified form of regular expressions. # 12th February 2022, 3:17 am