429 items tagged “datasette”
Datasette is an open source tool for exploring and publishing data.
2024
Civic Band. Exciting new civic tech project from Philip James: 30 (and counting) Datasette instances serving full-text search enabled collections of OCRd meeting minutes for different civic governments. Includes 20,000 pages for Alameda, 17,000 for Pittsburgh, 3,567 for Baltimore and an enormous 117,000 for Maui County.
Philip includes some notes on how they're doing it. They gather PDF minute notes from anywhere that provides API access to them, then run local Tesseract for OCR (the cost of cloud-based OCR proving prohibitive given the volume of data). The collection is then deployed to a single VPS running multiple instances of Datasette via Caddy, one instance for each of the covered regions.
Weeknotes: Datasette Studio and a whole lot of blogging
I’m still spinning back up after my trip back to the UK, so actual time spent building things has been less than I’d like. I presented an hour long workshop on command-line LLM usage, wrote five full blog entries (since my last weeknotes) and I’ve also been leaning more into short-form link blogging—a lot more prominent on this site now since my homepage redesign last week.
[... 736 words]Language models on the command-line
I gave a talk about accessing Large Language Models from the command-line last week as part of the Mastering LLMs: A Conference For Developers & Data Scientists six week long online conference. The talk focused on my LLM Python command-line utility and ways you can use it (and its plugins) to explore LLMs and use them for useful tasks.
[... 4,992 words]Datasette 0.64.7.
A very minor dot-fix release for Datasette stable, addressing this bug where Datasette running against the latest version of SQLite - 3.46.0 - threw an error on canned queries that included :named
parameters in their SQL.
The root cause was Datasette using a now invalid clever trick I came up with against the undocumented and unstable opcodes returned by a SQLite EXPLAIN
query.
I asked on the SQLite forum and learned that the feature I was using was removed in this commit to SQLite. D. Richard Hipp explains:
The P4 parameter to OP_Variable was not being used for anything. By omitting it, we make the prepared statement slightly smaller, reduce the size of the SQLite library by a few bytes, and help sqlite3_prepare() and similar run slightly faster.
Ham radio general exam question pool as JSON. I scraped a pass of my Ham radio general exam this morning. One of the tools I used to help me pass was a Datasette instance with all 429 questions from the official question pool. I've published that raw data as JSON on GitHub, which I converted from the official question pool document using an Observable notebook.
Relevant TIL: How I studied for my Ham radio general exam.
datasette-pins — a new Datasette plugin for pinning tables and queries. Alex Garcia built this plugin for Datasette Cloud, and as with almost every Datasette Cloud features we're releasing it as an open source package as well.
datasette-pins
allows users with the right permission to "pin" tables, databases and queries to their homepage. It's a lightweight way to customize that homepage, especially useful as your Datasette instance grows to host dozens or even hundreds of tables.
Weeknotes: more datasette-secrets, plus a mystery video project
I introduced datasette-secrets
two weeks ago. The core idea is to provide a way for end-users to store secrets such as API keys in Datasette, allowing other plugins to access them.
Food Delivery Leak Unmasks Russian Security Agents. This story is from April 2022 but I realize now I never linked to it.
Yandex Food, a popular food delivery service in Russia, suffered a major data leak.
The data included an order history with names, addresses and phone numbers of people who had placed food orders through that service.
Bellingcat were able to cross-reference this leak with addresses of Russian security service buildings—including those linked to the GRU and FSB.This allowed them to identify the names and phone numbers of people working for those organizations, and then combine that information with further leaked data as part of their other investigations.
If you look closely at the screenshots in this story they may look familiar: Bellingcat were using Datasette internally as a tool for exploring this data!
Weeknotes: Llama 3, AI for Data Journalism, llm-evals and datasette-secrets
Llama 3 landed on Thursday. I ended up updating a whole bunch of different plugins to work with it, described in Options for accessing Llama 3 from the terminal using LLM.
[... 1,030 words]AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now
I gave a talk last month at the Story Discovery at Scale data journalism conference hosted at Stanford by Big Local News. My brief was to go deep into the things we can use Large Language Models for right now, illustrated by a flurry of demos to help provide starting points for further conversations at the conference.
[... 6,081 words]Extracting data from unstructured text and images with Datasette and GPT-4 Turbo. Datasette Extract is a new Datasette plugin that uses GPT-4 Turbo (released to general availability today) and GPT-4 Vision to extract structured data from unstructured text and images.
I put together a video demo of the plugin in action today, and posted it to the Datasette Cloud blog along with screenshots and a tutorial describing how to use it.
datasette-import. A new plugin for importing data into Datasette. This is a replacement for datasette-paste, duplicating and extending its functionality. datasette-paste had grown beyond just dealing with pasted CSV/TSV/JSON data—it handles file uploads as well now—which inspired the new name.
Add ETag header for static responses. I’ve been procrastinating on adding better caching headers for static assets (JavaScript and CSS) served by Datasette for several years, because I’ve been wanting to implement the perfect solution that sets far-future cache headers on every asset and ensures the URLs change when they are updated.
Agustin Bacigalup just submitted the best kind of pull request: he observed that adding ETag support for static assets would side-step the complexity while adding much of the benefit, and implemented it along with tests.
It’s a substantial performance improvement for any Datasette instance with a number of JavaScript plugins... like the ones we are building on Datasette Cloud. I’m just annoyed we didn’t ship something like this sooner!
Weeknotes: the aftermath of NICAR
NICAR was fantastic this year. Alex and I ran a successful workshop on Datasette and Datasette Cloud, and I gave a lightning talk demonstrating two new GPT-4 powered Datasette plugins—datasette-enrichments-gpt and datasette-extract. I need to write more about the latter one: it enables populating tables from unstructured content (using a variant of this technique) and it’s really effective. I got it working just in time for the conference.
[... 1,430 words]datasette/studio. I’m trying a new way to make Datasette available for small personal data manipulation projects, using GitHub Codespaces.
This repository is designed to be opened directly in Codespaces—detailed instructions in the README.
When the container starts it installs the datasette-studio family of plugins—including CSV upload, some enrichments and a few other useful feature—then starts the server running and provides a big green button to click to access the server via GitHub’s port forwarding mechanism.
Datasette 1.0a12. Another alpha release, this time with a new query_actions() plugin hook, a new design for the table, database and query actions menus, a “does not contain” table filter and a fix for a minor bug with the JavaScript makeColumnActions() plugin mechanism.
Weeknotes: Getting ready for NICAR
Next week is NICAR 2024 in Baltimore—the annual data journalism conference hosted by Investigative Reporters and Editors. I’m running a workshop on Datasette, and I plan to spend most of my time in the hallway track talking to people about Datasette, Datasette Cloud and how the Datasette ecosystem can best help support their work.
[... 1,390 words]dclient 0.3. dclient is my CLI utility for working with remote Datasette instances—in particular for authenticating with them and then running both read-only SQL queries and inserting data using the new Datasette write JSON API. I just picked up work on the project again after a six month gap—the insert command can now be used to constantly stream data directly to hosted Datasette instances such as Datasette Cloud.
datasette-studio. I've been thinking for a while that it might be interesting to have a version of Datasette that comes bundled with a set of useful plugins, aimed at expanding Datasette's default functionality to cover things like importing data and editing schemas.
This morning I built the very first experimental preview of what that could look like. Install it using pipx
:
pipx install datasette-studio
I recommend pipx because it will ensure datasette-studio
gets its own isolated environment, independent of any other Datasette installations you might have.
Now running datasette-studio
instead of datasette
will get you the version with the bundled plugins.
The implementation of this is fun - it's a single pyproject.toml file defining the dependencies and setting up the datasette-studio
CLI hook, which is enough to provide the full set of functionality.
Is this a good idea? I don't know yet, but it's certainly an interesting initial experiment.
Datasette 1.0a10. The only changes in this alpha release concern the way Datasette handles database transactions. The database.execute_write_fn() internal method used to leave functions to implement transactions on their own—it now defaults to wrapping them in a transaction unless they opt out with the new transaction=False parameter.
In implementing this I found several places inside Datasette—in particular parts of the JSON write API—which had not been handling transactions correctly. Those are all now fixed.
Datasette 1.0a9. A new Datasette alpha release today. This adds basic alter table support API support, so you can request Datasette modify a table to add new columns needed for JSON objects submitted to the insert, upsert or update APIs.
It also makes some permission changes—fixing a minor bug with upsert permissions, and introducing a new rule where every permission plugin gets consulted for a permission check, with just one refusal vetoing that check.
Weeknotes: a Datasette release, an LLM release and a bunch of new plugins
I wrote extensive annotated release notes for Datasette 1.0a8 and LLM 0.13 already. Here’s what else I’ve been up to this past three weeks.
[... 1,074 words]Datasette 1.0a8: JavaScript plugins, new plugin hooks and plugin configuration in datasette.yaml
I just released Datasette 1.0a8. These are the annotated release notes.
[... 1,709 words]Weeknotes: datasette-test, datasette-build, PSF board retreat
I wrote about Page caching and custom templates in my last weeknotes. This week I wrapped up that work, modifying datasette-edit-templates to be compatible with the jinja2_environment_from_request() plugin hook. This means you can edit templates directly in Datasette itself and have those served either for the full instance or just for the instance when served from a specific domain (the Datasette Cloud case).
[... 757 words]Weeknotes: Page caching and custom templates for Datasette Cloud
My main development focus this week has been adding public page caching to Datasette Cloud, and exploring what custom template support might look like for that service.
[... 924 words]2023
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.
Weeknotes: datasette-enrichments, datasette-comments, sqlite-chronicle
I’ve mainly been working on Datasette Enrichments and continuing to explore the possibilities enabled by sqlite-chronicle.
[... 1,123 words]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.
Datasette Enrichments: a new plugin framework for augmenting your data
Today I’m releasing datasette-enrichments, a new feature for Datasette which provides a framework for applying “enrichments” that can augment your data.
[... 1,202 words]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.