Simon Willison’s Weblog

goodreads-to-sqlite (via) This is so cool! Tobias Kunze built a Python CLI tool to import your Goodreads data into a SQLite database, inspired by github-to-sqlite and my various other Dogsheep tools. It’s the first Dogsheep style tool I’ve seen that wasn’t built by me—and Tobias’ write-up includes some neat examples of queries you can run against your Goodreads data. I’ve now started using Goodreads and I’m importing my books into my own private Dogsheep Datasette instance. # 14th October 2019, 4:07 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

healthkit-to-sqlite. Ever since I got an Apple Watch I’ve been itching to get my hands on the step tracking and health data that it’s been collecting for me. I know it’s there in a SQLite database on my wrist, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it! A few days ago I stumbled across the “Export Health Data” button in the iOS Health app, and it turns out it creates a zip file containing XML with a full dump of the data collected by Apple Health. healthkit-to-sqlite is the tool I’ve built that can read that export and use it to create a SQLite database ready to be queried and explored with Datasette. It’s a pretty basic implementation but it’s already giving me access to over 3 million rows of data. Lots of potential here for interesting work with personal analytics. # 22nd July 2019, 3:34 am

Unlocking the Department of State’s foreign military training data for good this time (via) I’m so excited about this: Security Force Monitor used Datasette to publish a 200,000 row database of training engagements between the US military and foreign military units, based on their own massive efforts to clean up the official data (from thousands of PDF files). This is pretty much my dream use-case for Datasette, and their future goals are inspiring: “Our hope is that when the next report arrives in a short few months, we will be able to turn it into machine readable data and pass it around the sector in minutes, rather than months.” # 20th July 2019, 4:42 am

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

Public Data Release of Stack Overflow’s 2019 Developer Survey. Here’s the Stack Overflow announcement of their developer survey public data release, which discusses the Glitch partnership and mentions Datasette. # 21st May 2019, 6:51 pm

Discover Insights in Developer Survey Results. Stack Overflow partnered with Glitch and used Datasette to host the full data set from Stack Overflow’s 2019 Developer Survey! # 21st May 2019, 6:50 pm

JSK Journalism Fellowships names Class of 2019-2020 (and I’m in it!) (via) In personal news... I’ve been accepted for a ten month journalism fellowship at Stanford (starting September)! My work there will involve “Improving the impact of investigative stories by expanding the open-source ecosystem of tools that allows journalists to share the underlying data”. # 1st May 2019, 4:43 pm

Dockerfile for creating a Datasette of NHS dentist information (via) Really neat Dockerfile example by Alf Eaton that uses multi-stage builds to pull dentist information from the NHS, compile to SQLite using csvs-to-sqlite and serve the results with Datasette. TIL the NHS like to use ¬ as their CSV separator! # 26th April 2019, 2:09 pm

Datasette: ?_where=sql-fragment parameter for table views. I just shipped a tiny but really useful new feature to Datasette master: you can now add ?_where=sql-fragment on to the URL of any table view to inject additional SQL directly into the underlying WHERE clause. This tiny feature actually has some really interesting applications: I created this because I wanted to be able to run more complex custom SQL queries without losing access to the conveniences of Datasette’s table view, in particular the built-in faceting support. The feature actually fits in well with Datasette’s philosophy of allowing arbitrary SQL to be executed against a read-only database: you can turn this ability off using the allow_sql config flag. # 13th April 2019, 2 am

Ministry of Silly Runtimes: Vintage Python on Cloud Run (via) Cloud Run is an exciting new hosting service from Google that lets you define a container using a Dockerfile and then run that container in a “scale to zero” environment, so you only pay for time spent serving traffic. It’s similar to the now-deprecated Zeit Now 1.0 which inspired me to create Datasette. Here Dustin Ingram demonstrates how powerful Docker can be as the underlying abstraction by deploying a web app using a 25 year old version of Python 1.x. # 9th April 2019, 5:33 pm

datasette-jellyfish. I learned about a handy Python library called Jellyfish which implements approximate and phonetic matching of strings—soundex, metaphone, porter stemming, levenshtein distance and more. I’ve built a simple Datasette plugin which wraps the library and makes each of those algorithms available as a SQL function. # 9th March 2019, 6:29 pm

Publish the data behind your stories with SQLite and Datasette. I presented a workshop on Datasette at the IRE and NICAR CAR 2019 data journalism conference yesterday. Here’s the worksheet I prepared for the tutorial. # 9th March 2019, 6:27 pm

socrata2sql (via) Phenomenal new open source tool released by Andrew Chavez at the Dallas Morning News. Socrata is the open data portal software used by huge numbers of local governments worldwide. socrata2sql is a tool that interacts with the standard Socrata API and can use it to suck down a dataset and save it as a SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL or other SQLAlchemy-supported database. I just tried this and it took a single command to create a SQLite database of every police arrest in Dallas in the past five years. # 8th February 2019, 3:27 pm