Simon Willison’s Weblog

SQL Murder Mystery in Datasette (via) “A crime has taken place and the detective needs your help. The detective gave you the  crime scene report, but you somehow lost it. You vaguely remember that the crime  was a murder that occurred sometime on ​Jan.15, 2018 and that it took place in SQL  City. Start by retrieving the corresponding crime scene report from the police  department’s database.”—Really fun game to help exercise your skills with SQL by the NU Knight Lab. I loaded their SQLite database into Datasette so you can play in your browser.

# 7th October 2019, 11:37 pm / datasette, projects, sql, sqlite

genome-to-sqlite. I just found out 23andMe let you export your genome as a zipped TSV file, so I wrote a little Python command-line tool to import it into a SQLite database.

# 19th September 2019, 3:58 pm / projects, datasette, genetics, sqlite

sqlite-utils 1.11. Amjith Ramanujam contributed an excellent new feature to sqlite-utils, which I’ve now released as part of version 1.11. Previously you could enable SQLite full-text-search on a table using the .enable_fts() method (or the “sqlite-utils enable-fts” CLI command) but it wouldn’t reflect future changes to the table—you had to use populate_fts() any time you inserted new records. Thanks to Amjith you can now pass create_triggers=True (or --create-triggers) to cause sqlite-utils to automatically add triggers that keeps the FTS index up-to-date any time a row is inserted, updated or deleted from the table.

# 3rd September 2019, 1:05 am / projects, sqlite, full-text-search, sqlite-utils, cli

Working with many-to-many relationships in sqlite-utils (via) I just released sqlite-utils 1.9 with syntactic sugar support for creating many-to-many relationships for records stored in SQLite databases.

# 4th August 2019, 3:57 am / projects, sqlite, sqlite-utils

healthkit-to-sqlite. Ever since I got an Apple Watch I’ve been itching to get my hands on the step tracking and health data that it’s been collecting for me. I know it’s there in a SQLite database on my wrist, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it! A few days ago I stumbled across the “Export Health Data” button in the iOS Health app, and it turns out it creates a zip file containing XML with a full dump of the data collected by Apple Health. healthkit-to-sqlite is the tool I’ve built that can read that export and use it to create a SQLite database ready to be queried and explored with Datasette. It’s a pretty basic implementation but it’s already giving me access to over 3 million rows of data. Lots of potential here for interesting work with personal analytics.

# 22nd July 2019, 3:34 am / dogsheep, health, datasette, sqlite

db-to-sqlite 1.0 release. I’ve released version 1.0 of my db-to-sqlite tool, which lets you create a SQLite database copy of any database supported by SQLAlchemy (I’ve tested it against MySQL and PostgreSQL). The tool has a bunch of new features: you can use --redact to redact specific columns, specify --table multiple times to copy a subset of tables, and the --all option now efficiently adds all foreign keys at the end of the import. The project now has unit tests which run against MySQL and PostgreSQL in Travis CI. Also included in the README: a shell one-liner for creating a local SQLite copy of a remote Heroku Postgres database based on extracting the connection string from a Heroku config environment variable.

# 1st July 2019, 1:35 am / projects, datasette, sqlite, mysql, postgresql, heroku

Convert Locations.kml (pulled from an iPhone backup) to SQLite. I’ve been playing around with data from my iPhone using the iPhone Backup Extractor app and one of the things it exports for you is a Locations.kml file full of location history data. I wrote a tiny script using Python’s ElementTree XMLPullParser to efficiently iterate through the Placemarks and yield them as dictionaries, which I then batch-inserted into sqlite-utils to create a SQLite database.

# 14th June 2019, 12:45 am / kml, projects, sqlite, sqlite-utils, xml

sqlite-utils 1.0. I just released sqlite-utils 1.0, with a couple of handy new features over 0.14: it can now automatically add columns to a database table if you attempt to insert data which doesn’t quite fit (using alter=True in the Python API or the --alter option to the “sqlite-utils insert” command). It also has the ability to output nested JSON column values on the command-line using the new --json-cols option. This is the first project I’ve marked as a 1.0 release in a very long time—I’ll be sticking to semver for this project from now on, bumping the major version only in the case of a backwards incompatible change.

# 25th May 2019, 1:20 am / projects, versioning, sqlite, sqlite-utils, semantic-versioning

VisiData (via) Intriguing tool by Saul Pwanson: VisiData is a command-line "textpunk utility" for browsing and manipulating tabular data. pip3 install visidata and then vd myfile.csv (or .json or .xls or SQLite or others) and get an interactive terminal UI for quickly searching through the data, conducting frequency analysis of columns, manipulating it and much more besides. Two tips for if you start playing with it: hit gq to exit, and hit Ctrl+H to view the help screen.

# 18th March 2019, 3:45 am / csv, data-journalism, python, sqlite

huey. Charles Leifer’s “little task queue for Python”. Similar to Celery, but it’s designed to work with Redis, SQLite or in the parent process using background greenlets. Worth checking out for the really neat design. The project is new to me, but it’s been under active development since 2011 and has a very healthy looking rate of releases.

# 25th February 2019, 7:49 pm / sqlite, charles-leifer, python, queues, redis