Simon Willison’s Weblog

YQL—converting the web to JSON with mock SQL. YQL just got a whole lot more interesting to me—I had no idea they were exposing an HTML and RSS scraping tool over a JSONP API in addition to all of the Yahoo! web service methods.

# 13th December 2008, 9:39 am / yql, scraping, json, yahoo, html, jsonp, sql

Secrets of the Django ORM. An undocumented (and unsupported) method of poking a Django QuerySet’s internal query to add group_by and having clauses to a SQL query.

# 8th November 2008, 11:49 pm / django, orm, queryset, sql, having, groupby, python

Mass Attack FAQ. Thousands of IIS Web servers have been infected with an automated mass XSS attack, not through a specific IIS vulnerability but using a universal XSS SQL query that targets SQL Server and modifies every text field to add the attack JavaScript. If an app has even a single SQL injection hole (and many do) it is likely to be compromised.

# 26th April 2008, 9:12 am / iis, massattack, security, sql-injection, xss, sqlserver, sql

IronPython, MS SQL, and PEP 249. How Dino Viehland got Django’s ORM to talk to the .NET database layer.

# 19th March 2008, 9:46 am / dinoviehland, dotnet, microsoft, django, python, ironpython, mssql, pep249, sql

Queryset Implementation. Malcolm explains the work that has gone in to the queryset-refactor branch. Executive summary: Python’s ORM is probably a lot better at SQL than you are.

# 19th March 2008, 9:43 am / sql, orm, python, django, querysetrefactor, malcolm-tredinnick

django-mptt (via) Jonathan Buchanan’s simple utility for performing Modified Preorder Tree Traversal (efficient tree operations in SQL) on Django models.

# 29th December 2007, 11:33 am / modifiedpreordertreetraversal, mptt, django, python, djangoorm, models, jonathan-buchanan, sql

A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins. It turns out Venn diagrams are an excellent way of illustrating joins.

# 12th October 2007, 9:42 am / sql, jeff-atwood, venndiagrams

DbMigration—a schema migration tool for Django. Nice and simple tool for adding schema migrations to a Django application.

# 27th September 2007, 3:04 pm / django, orm, djangoorm, migrations, sql, python

Finding Lookup Items that Are Not Used. How to do left outer joins (and other custom SQL) using the Django ORM.

# 13th August 2007, 5:08 pm / django, orm, sql, michael-trier, python

Storm. New Python ORM from Canonical, emphasising multiple database support, intelligent local cache invalidation and a thin layer over the underlying SQL.

# 9th July 2007, 8:44 am / sql, orm, storm, canonical, python

SELECT * FROM everything, or why databases are awesome. I’m beginning to think that for scalable applications the thinner your ORM is the better—if you even use one at all.

# 22nd June 2007, 12:40 am / rails, orm, blaine-cook, scaling, twitter, databases, sql

Facebook Query Language. The Facebook API now lets you run SQL-like queries. You can’t do joins but you can perform very simple subselects.

# 25th February 2007, 12:06 pm / apis, facebook, sql, webapis