1,525 posts tagged “datasette”
Datasette is an open source tool for exploring and publishing data.
2018
datasette-vega (via) I wrote a visualization plugin for Datasette that uses the excellent Vega “visualization grammar” library to provide bar, line and scatter charts configurable against any Datasette table or SQL query.
Query Parquet files in SQLite. Colin Dellow built a SQLite virtual table extension that lets you query Parquet files directly using SQL. Parquet is interesting because it’s a columnar format that dramatically reduces the space needed to store tables with lots of duplicate column data—most CSV files, for example. Colin reports being able to shrink a 1291 MB CSV file from the Canadian census to an equivalent Parquet file weighing just 42MB (3% of the original)—then running a complex query against the data in just 60ms. I’d love to see someone get this extension working with Datasette.
Datasette 0.23: CSV, SpatiaLite and more (via) The big new feature in 0.23 is CSV export: any Datasette table or query can now be exported as CSV, including the option to get all matching rows in one giant CSV file taking advantage of Python 3 async and Datasette’s efficient keyset pagination. Also in this release: improved support for SpatiaLite and various JSON API improvements including the ability to expand foreign key labels in JSON and CSV responses.
SpatiaLite — Datasette documentation. Datasette’s documentation now includes extensive coverage of the SpatiaLite extension for SQLite: how to install it, how to import latitude/longitude points, shapefiles and GeoJSON data into SpatiaLite tables, and how to run SQL queries against it that take advantage of spatial indexes. I’m learning SpatiaLite at the moment and filling out the documentation with each new trick I learn as I go—as Mark Pilgrim once taught me, the best way to learn a new technology is to write about it.
Datasette Facets
Datasette 0.22 is out with the most significant new feature I’ve added since the initial release: faceted browse.
[... 1,189 words]sqlitebiter. Similar to my csvs-to-sqlite tool, but sqlitebiter handles “CSV/Excel/HTML/JSON/LTSV/Markdown/SQLite/SSV/TSV/Google-Sheets”. Most interestingly, it works against HTML pages—run “sqlitebiter -v url ’https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_firewalls’” and it will scrape that Wikipedia page and create a SQLite table for each of the HTML tables it finds there.
Datasette: Full-text search. I wrote some documentation for Datasette’s full-text search feature, which detects tables which have been configured to use the SQLite FTS module and adds a search input box and support for a _search= querystring parameter.
Datasette: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (via) The Metropolitan Museum of Art publish a CSV file on GitHub with details of 464,360 items from their collection. I turned it into a searchable Datasette instance.
Notes from my appearance on the Changelog podcast
After I spoke at Zeit Day SF last weekend I sat down with Adam Stacoviak to record a 25 minute segment for episode 296 of the Changelog podcast, talking about Datasette. We covered a lot of ground!
[... 536 words]Datasette 0.21: New _shape=, new _size=, search within columns. Nothing earth-shattering here but it’s accumulated enough small improvements that it warranted a new release. You can now send ?_shape=array to get back a plain JSON array of results, ?_size=XXX|max to get back a specific number of rows from a table view and ?_search_COLUMN=text to run full-text search against a specific column.
Datasette—a talk at Zeit Day SF 2018 (via) Slides from the talk I gave today about Datasette and Datasette Publish at the Zeit Day SF conference.
Exploring the UK Register of Members Interests with SQL and Datasette
Ever wondered which UK Members of Parliament get gifted the most helicopter rides? How about which MPs have been given Christmas hampers by the Sultan of Brunei? (David Cameron, William Hague and Michael Howard apparently). Here’s how to dig through the Register of Members Interests using SQL and Datasette.
[... 1,167 words]JSON Escape Text. I built a tiny tool for turning text into an escaped JSON string—I needed it to help create descriptions and canned SQL queries for adding to Datasette’s metadata.json files.
Datasette ClusterMap Plugin – Querying UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) Food Hygiene Ratings Open Data (via) Tony Hirst wrote a tutorial on using datasette-cluster-map to analyze food hygiene ratings data from the FSA
Datasette plugins, and building a clustered map visualization
Datasette now supports plugins!
[... 751 words]Datasette 0.19: Plugins Documentation (via) I’ve released the first preview of Datasette’s new plugin support, which uses the pluggy package originally developed for py.test. So far the only two plugin hooks are for SQLite connection creation (allowing custom SQL functions to be registered) and Jinja2 template environment initialization (for custom template tags), but this release is mainly about exercising the plugin registration mechanism and starting to gather feedback. Lots more to come.
Datasette 0.18: units (via) This release features the first Datasette feature that was entirely designed and implemented by someone else (yay open source)—Russ Garrett wanted unit support (Hz, ft etc) for his Wireless Telegraphy Register project. It’s a really neat implementation: you can tell Datasette what units are in use for a particular database column and it will display the correct SI symbols on the page. Specifying units also enables unit-aware filtering: if Datasette knows that a column is measured in meters you can now query it for all rows that are less than 50 feet for example.
Wireless Telegraphy Register (via) Russ Garrett used Datasette to build a browsable interface to the UK’s register of business radio licenses, using data from Ofcom.
Datasette 0.15: sort by column (via) I’ve released the latest version of Datasette to PyPI. The key new feature is the ability to sort tables by column, using clickable column headers or directly via the new _sort= and _sort_desc= querystring parameters.
Baltimore Sun Public Salary Records (via) The Baltimore Sun have published an interactive search engine for public salaries of Maryland state employees, and it’s powered by Datasette! Since data journalism is one of my key use-cases for Datasette I’m incredibly excited to see this in the wild. They’ve also published the underlying source code (see the via link) which is a really nice example of how to use Datasette’s custom templates and canned query functionality.