Simon Willison’s Weblog

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349 items tagged “datasette”

2022

Weeknotes: Datasette, sqlite-utils, Datasette Desktop

A flurry of releases this week, including a new Datasette alpha and a fixed Datasette Desktop.

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Datasette Discord community (via) I started a Discord chat community for Datasette. 57 people have joined up already! # 15th July 2022, 3:17 am

sqlite-comprehend: run AWS entity extraction against content in a SQLite database

I built a new tool this week: sqlite-comprehend, which passes text from a SQLite database through the AWS Comprehend entity extraction service and stores the returned entities.

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Joining CSV files in your browser using Datasette Lite

I added a new feature to Datasette Lite—my version of Datasette that runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly (previously): you can now use it to load one or more CSV files by URL, and then run SQL queries against them—including joins across data from multiple files.

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Weeknotes: datasette-socrata, and the last 10%...

... takes 90% of the work. I continue to work towards a preview of the new Datasette Cloud, and keep finding new “just one more things” to delay inviting in users.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud ready to preview

I made an absolute ton of progress building Datasette Cloud on Fly this week, and also had a bunch of fun playing with GPT-3.

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A Datasette tutorial written by GPT-3

I’ve been playing around with OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model playground for a few months now. It’s a fascinating piece of software. You can sign up here—apparently there’s no longer a waiting list.

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Architecture Notes: Datasette (via) I was interviewed for the first edition of Architecture Notes—a new publication (website and newsletter) about software architecture created by Mahdi Yusuf. We covered a bunch of topics in detail: ASGI, SQLIte and asyncio, Baked Data, plugin hook design, Python in WebAssembly, Python in an Electron app and more. Mahdi also turned my scrappy diagrams into beautiful illustrations for the piece. # 27th May 2022, 3:20 pm

Weeknotes: Building Datasette Cloud on Fly Machines, Furo for documentation

Hosting provider Fly released Fly Machines this week. I got an early preview and I’ve been working with it for a few days—it’s a fascinating new piece of technology. I’m using it to get my hosting service for Datasette ready for wider release.

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simonw/datasette-screenshots (via) I started a new GitHub repository to automate taking screenshots of Datasette for marketing purposes, using my shot-scraper browser automation tool. # 17th May 2022, 5:56 pm

Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, nogil Python, HYTRADBOI

My big project this week was Datasette Lite, a new way to run Datasette directly in a browser, powered by WebAssembly and Pyodide. I also continued my research into running SQL queries in parallel, described last week. Plus I spoke at HYTRADBOI.

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Datasette Lite: a server-side Python web application running in a browser

Datasette Lite is a new way to run Datasette: entirely in a browser, taking advantage of the incredible Pyodide project which provides Python compiled to WebAssembly plus a whole suite of useful extras.

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Automatically opening issues when tracked file content changes

I figured out a GitHub Actions pattern to keep track of a file published somewhere on the internet and automatically open a new repository issue any time the contents of that file changes.

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Weeknotes: Parallel SQL queries for Datasette, plus some middleware tricks

A promising new performance optimization for Datasette, plus new datasette-gzip and datasette-total-page-time plugins.

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Useful tricks with pip install URL and GitHub

The pip install command can accept a URL to a zip file or tarball. GitHub provides URLs that can create a zip file of any branch, tag or commit in any repository. Combining these is a really useful trick for maintaining Python packages.

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Building a Covid sewage Twitter bot (and other weeknotes)

I built a new Twitter bot today: @covidsewage. It tweets a daily screenshot of the latest Covid sewage monitoring data published by Santa Clara county.

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Datasette for geospatial analysis (via) I added a new page to the Datasette website describing how Datasette can be used for geospatial analysis, pulling together several of the relevant plugins and tools from the Datasette ecosystem. # 13th April 2022, 12:48 am

Pillar Point Stewards, pypi-to-sqlite, improvements to shot-scraper and appreciating datasette-dashboards

This week I helped Natalie launch the Pillar Point Stewards website and built a new tool for loading PyPI package data into SQLite, in order to help promote the excellent datasette-dashboards plugin by Romain Clement.

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datasette-dashboards (via) Romain Clement’s datasette-dashboards plugin lets you configure dashboards for Datasette using YAML, combining markdown blocks, Vega graphs and single number metrics using a layout powered by CSS grids. This is a beautiful piece of software design, with a very compelling live demo. # 7th April 2022, 6:36 pm

Weeknotes: datasette-auth0

Datasette 0.61, a Twitter Space and a new Datasette plugin for authenticating against Auth0.

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Datasette 0.61: The annotated release notes

I released Datasette 0.61 this morning—closely followed by 0.61.1 to fix a minor bug. Here are the annotated release notes.

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SQLite Happy Hour—a Twitter Spaces conversation about three interesting projects building on SQLite

Yesterday I hosted SQLite Happy Hour. my first conversation using Twitter Spaces. The idea was to dig into three different projects that were doing interesting things on top of SQLite. I think it worked pretty well, and I’m curious to explore this format more in the future.

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Weeknotes: Tildes not dashes, and the big refactor

After last week’s shot-scraper distractions with Playwright, this week I finally managed to make some concrete progress on the path towards Datasette 1.0.

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Weeknotes: Distracted by Playwright

My goal for this week was to unblock progress on Datasette by finally finishing the dash encoding implementation I described last week. I was getting close, and then I got very distracted by Playwright.

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Why I invented “dash encoding”, a new encoding scheme for URL paths

Datasette now includes its own custom string encoding scheme, which I’ve called dash encoding. I really didn’t want to have to invent something new here, but unfortunately I think this is the best solution to my very particular problem. Some notes on how dash encoding works and why I created it.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Tutorials

I published two new tutorials for Datasette this week, both focused at end-users of the web application.

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Google Drive to SQLite

I released a new tool this week: google-drive-to-sqlite. It’s a CLI utility for fetching metadata about files in your Google Drive and writing them to a local SQLite database.

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Using SQLite and Datasette with Fly Volumes

A few weeks ago, Fly announced Free Postgres Databases as part of the free tier of their hosting product. Their announcement included this snippet:

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Datasette table diagram using Mermaid (via) Mermaid is a DSL for generating diagrams from plain text, designed to be embedded in Markdown. GitHub just added support for Mermaid to their Markdown pipeline, which inspired me to try it out. Here’s an Observable Notebook I built which uses Mermaid to visualize the relationships between Datasette tables based on their foreign keys. # 14th February 2022, 7:43 pm

Weeknotes: python_requires, documentation SEO

Fixed Datasette on Python 3.6 for the last time. Worked on documentation infrastructure improvements. Spent some time with Fly Volumes.

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