Simon Willison’s Weblog

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

GitHub Accelerator: our first cohort. I’m participating in the first cohort of GitHub’s new open source accelerator program, with Datasette (and related projects). It’s a 10 week program with 20 projects working together “with an end goal of building durable streams of funding for their work”. # 13th April 2023, 5:28 pm

Datasette: Gather feedback on new ?_extra= design. I just landed the single biggest backwards-incompatible change to Datasette ever, in preparation for the 1.0 release. It’s a change to the default JSON format from the Datasette API—the new format is much slimmer, and can be expanded using a new ?_extra= query string parameter. I’m desperately keen on getting feedback on this change! This issues has more details and a call for feedback. # 22nd March 2023, 11:14 pm

Using Datasette in GitHub Codespaces. A new Datasette tutorial showing how it can be run inside GitHub Codespaces—GitHub’s browser-based development environments—in order to explore and analyze data. I’ve been using Codespaces to run tutorials recently and it’s absolutely fantastic, because it puts every tutorial attendee on a level playing field with respect to their development environments. # 24th February 2023, 12:40 am

Introducing sqlite-vss: A SQLite Extension for Vector Search (via) This latest SQLite extension from Alex Garcia is possibly his best yet: it adds FAISS-powered vector similarity search directly to SQLite, enabling fast KNN similarity lookups against a virtual table that feels a lot like SQLite’s own built-in full text search feature. This write-up includes interactive demos using Datasette called from an Observable notebook, running similarity searches against an index of 200,000 news headlines and summaries in less than 50ms. # 10th February 2023, 10:53 pm

Making SQLite extensions pip install-able (via) Alex Garcia figured out how to bundle a compiled SQLite extension in a Python wheel (building different wheels for different platforms) and publish them to PyPI. This is a huge leap forward in terms of the usability of SQLite extensions, which have previously been pretty difficult to actually install and run. Alex also created Datasette plugins that depend on his packages, so you can now “datasette install datasette-sqlite-regex” (or datasette-sqlite-ulid, datasette-sqlite-fastrand, datasette-sqlite-jsonschema) to gain access to his custom SQLite extensions in your Datasette instance. It even works with “datasette publish --install” to deploy to Vercel, Fly.io and Cloud Run. # 6th February 2023, 7:44 pm