Simon Willison’s Weblog

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18 items tagged “graphql”

2023

graphql-voyager. Neat tool for producing an interactive graph visualization of any GraphQL API. Click “Change schema” and then “Introspection” and it will give you a GraphQL query you can run against your own API—copy and paste back the JSON results and the visualizer will show you how your API fits together. I tested this against a datasette-graphql instance and it worked exactly as described. # 27th January 2023, 11:58 pm

2022

Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs (via) I was excited about Dgraph as an interesting option in the graph database space. It didn’t work out, and founder Manish Rai Jain provides a thoughtful retrospective as to why, full of useful insights for other startup founders considering projects in a similar space. # 16th September 2022, 6:43 pm

Help scraping: track changes to CLI tools by recording their --help using Git

I’ve been experimenting with a new variant of Git scraping this week which I’m calling Help scraping. The key idea is to track changes made to CLI tools over time by recording the output of their --help commands in a Git repository.

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2021

Weeknotes: sqlite-transform 1.1, Datasette 0.58.1, datasette-graphql 1.5

Work on Project Pelican inspires new features and improvements across a number of different projects.

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2020

Weeknotes: github-to-sqlite workflows, datasette-ripgrep enhancements, Datasette 0.52

This week: Improvements to datasette-ripgrep, github-to-sqlite and datasette-graphql, plus Datasette 0.52 and a flurry of dot-releases.

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Weeknotes: datasette-indieauth, datasette-graphql, PyCon Argentina

Last week’s weeknotes took the form of my Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data talk write-up, which represented most of what I got done that week. This week I mainly worked on datasette-indieauth, but I also gave a keynote at PyCon Argentina and released a version of datasette-graphql with a small security fix.

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datasette-graphql 1.2 (via) A new release of the datasette-graphql plugin, fixing a minor security flaw: previous versions of the plugin could expose the schema (but not the actual data) of tables in databases that were otherwise protected by Datasette’s permission system. # 21st November 2020, 10:21 pm

Datasette Weekly: Datasette 0.50, git scraping, extracting columns (via) The first edition of the new Datasette Weekly newsletter—covering Datasette 0.50, Git scraping, extracting columns with sqlite-utils and featuring datasette-graphql as the first “plugin of the week” # 10th October 2020, 9 pm

Refactoring databases with sqlite-utils extract

Yesterday I described the new sqlite-utils transform mechanism for applying SQLite table transformations that go beyond those supported by ALTER TABLE. The other new feature in sqlite-utils 2.20 builds on that capability to allow you to refactor a database table by extracting columns into separate tables. I’ve called it sqlite-utils extract.

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Weeknotes: California Protected Areas in Datasette

This week I built a geospatial search engine for protected areas in California, shipped datasette-graphql 1.0 and started working towards the next milestone for Datasette Cloud.

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Weeknotes: Rocky Beaches, Datasette 0.48, a commit history of my database

This week I helped Natalie launch Rocky Beaches, shipped Datasette 0.48 and several releases of datasette-graphql, upgraded the CSRF protection for datasette-upload-csvs and figured out how to get a commit log of changes to my blog by backing up its database to a GitHub repository.

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Weeknotes: Installing Datasette with Homebrew, more GraphQL, WAL in SQLite

This week I’ve been working on making Datasette easier to install, plus wide-ranging improvements to the Datasette GraphQL plugin.

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GraphQL in Datasette with the new datasette-graphql plugin

This week I’ve mostly been building datasette-graphql, a plugin that adds GraphQL query support to Datasette.

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Building a self-updating profile README for GitHub

GitHub quietly released a new feature at some point in the past few days: profile READMEs. Create a repository with the same name as your GitHub account (in my case that’s github.com/simonw/simonw), add a README.md to it and GitHub will render the contents at the top of your personal profile page—for me that’s github.com/simonw

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How Super Graph compiles GraphQL to a single SQL query. Super Graph is a GraphQL server that compiles arbitrarily nested GraphQL queries to “a single fast SQL query”. I’ve always wondered how that could possible work, so I asked author Vikram Rangnekar for an example of a compiled query—it turns out it uses a brilliant sequence of JSON aggregations to glue together results from nested subqueries and left outer joins. # 16th April 2020, 10:52 pm

SQL is a better API language than GraphQL – Convince me otherwise (via) A dumb tweet I posted this morning blew up today and ended up on the Hacker News homepage. # 16th April 2020, 10:44 pm

PostGraphile: Production Considerations. PostGraphile is a tool for building a GraphQL API on top of an existing PostgreSQL schema. Their “production considerations” documentation is particularly interesting because it directly addresses some of my biggest worries about GraphQL: the potential for someone to craft an expensive query that ties up server resources. PostGraphile suggests a number of techniques for avoiding this, including a statement timeout, a query allowlist, pagination caps and (in their “pro” version) a cost limit that uses a calculated cost score for the query. # 27th March 2020, 1:22 am

2017

Select Transform: JSON Template over JSON (via) A barrage of interesting ideas here. Having clients transmit up a JSON template which is then executed against data on the server and used to return exactly the data the client needs is just one of them (significant overlap with GraphQL there). # 18th October 2017, 5:12 pm