Simon Willison’s Weblog

datasette-plot—a new Datasette Plugin for building data visualizations. I forgot to link to this here last week: Alex Garcia released the first version of datasette-plot, a brand new Datasette visualization plugin built on top of the Observable Plot charting library. We plan to use this as the new, updated alternative to my older datasette-vega plugin. # 31st December 2023, 5:04 am

Simon Willison (Part Two): How Datasette Helps With Investigative Reporting. The second part of my Newsroom Robots podcast conversation with Nikita Roy. This episode includes my best audio answer yet to the “what is Datasette?” question, plus notes on how to use LLMs in journalism despite their propensity to make things up. # 5th December 2023, 8:27 pm

Annotate and explore your data with datasette-comments. New plugin for Datasette and Datasette Cloud: datasette-comments, providing tools for collaborating on data exploration with a team through posting comments on individual rows of data.

Alex Garcia built this for Datasette Cloud but as with almost all of our work there it’s also available as an open source Python package. # 30th November 2023, 9:59 pm

Getting started with the Datasette Cloud API. I wrote an introduction to the Datasette Cloud API for the company blog, with a tutorial showing how to use Python and GitHub Actions to import data from the Federal Register into a table in Datasette Cloud, then configure full-text search against it. # 28th September 2023, 11:05 pm

Geospatial SQL queries in SQLite using TG, sqlite-tg and datasette-sqlite-tg. Alex Garcia built sqlite-tg—a SQLite extension that uses the brand new TG geospatial library to provide a whole suite of custom SQL functions for working with geospatial data.

Here are my notes on trying out his initial alpha releases. The extension already provides tools for converting between GeoJSON, WKT and WKB, plus the all important tg_intersects() function for testing if a polygon or point overlap each other.

It’s pretty useful already. Without any geospatial indexing at all I was still able to get 700ms replies to a brute-force point-in-polygon query against 150MB of GeoJSON timezone boundaries stored as JSON text in a table. # 25th September 2023, 7:45 pm

Introducing datasette-litestream: easy replication for SQLite databases in Datasette. We use Litestream on Datasette Cloud for streaming backups of user data to S3. Alex Garcia extracted out our implementation into a standalone Datasette plugin, which bundles the Litestream Go binary (for the relevant platform) in the package you get when you run “datasette install datasette-litestream”—so now Datasette has a very robust answer to questions about SQLite disaster recovery beyond just the Datasette Cloud platform. # 13th September 2023, 7:28 pm

Datasette Cloud and the Datasette 1.0 alphas. I sent out the Datasette Newsletter for the first time in quite a while, with updates on Datasette Cloud, the Datasette 1.0 alphas, a note about the security vulnerability in those alphas and a summary of some of my research into combining LLMs with Datasette. # 22nd August 2023, 7:56 pm

Datasette 1.0 alpha series leaks names of databases and tables to unauthenticated users. I found and fixed a security vulnerability in the Datasette 1.0 alpha series, described in this GitHub security advisory.

The vulnerability allowed unauthenticated users to see the names of the databases and tables in an otherwise private Datasette instance—though not the actual table contents.

The fix is now shipped in Datasette 1.0a4.

The vulnerability affected Datasette Cloud as well, but thankfully I was able to analyze the access logs and confirm that no unauthenticated requests had been made against any of the affected endpoints. # 22nd August 2023, 5:44 pm

Introducing datasette-write-ui: a Datasette plugin for editing, inserting, and deleting rows. Alex García is working with me on Datasette Cloud for the next few months, graciously sponsored by Fly. We will be working in public, releasing open source code and documenting how to build a multi-tenant SaaS product using Fly Machines.

Alex’s first project is datasette-write-ui, a plugin that finally lets you directly edit data stored inside Datasette. Alex wrote about the plugin on our new Datasette Cloud blog. # 16th August 2023, 1:48 am

Welcome to Datasette Cloud. We launched the Datasette Cloud blog today! The SaaS hosted version of Datasette is ready to start onboarding more users—this post describes what it can do so far and hints at what’s planned to come next. # 16th August 2023, 1:46 am

Dependency Management Data (via) This is a really neat CLI tool by Jamie Tanna, built using Go and SQLite but with a feature that embeds a Datasette instance (literally shelling out to start the process running from within the Go application) to provide an interface for browsing the resulting database.

It addresses the challenge of keeping track of the dependencies used across an organization, by gathering them into a SQLite database from a variety of different sources—currently Dependabot, Renovate and some custom AWS tooling.

The “Example” page links to a live Datasette instance and includes video demos of the tool in action. # 11th August 2023, 3:54 pm

Datasette 1.0a3. A new Datasette alpha release. This one previews the new default JSON API design that’s coming in 1.0—the single most significant change in the 1.0 milestone, since I plan to keep that API stable for many years to come. # 9th August 2023, 8:49 pm

Data analysis with SQLite and Python. I turned my 2hr45m workshop from PyCon into the latest official tutorial on the Datasette website. It includes an extensive handout which should be useful independently of the video itself. # 2nd July 2023, 4:48 pm

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

Exploration de données avec Datasette. One of the great delights of open source development is seeing people run workshops on your project, even more so when they’re in a language other than English! Romain Clement presented this French workshop for the Python Grenoble meetup on 25th May 2023, using GitHub Codespaces as the environment. It’s pretty comprehensive, including a 300,000+ row example table which illustrates Datasette plugins such as datasette-cluster-map and datasette-leaflet-geojson. # 27th May 2023, 12:36 am

MMS Language Coverage in Datasette Lite. I converted the HTML table of 4,021 languages supported by Meta’s new Massively Multilingual Speech models to newline-delimited JSON and loaded it into Datasette Lite. Faceting by Language Family is particularly interesting—the top five families represented are Niger-Congo with 1,019, Austronesian with 609, Sino-Tibetan with 288, Indo-European with 278 and Afro-Asiatic with 222. # 22nd May 2023, 8:01 pm