Simon Willison’s Weblog

redbean (via) “redbean makes it possible to share web applications that run offline as a single-file αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε zip archive which contains your assets. All you need to do is download the redbean.com program below, change the filename to .zip, add your content in a zip editing tool, and then change the extension back to .com”.

redbean is implemented as a single C file with a dazzling array of clever tricks—most impressively, the single executable works on Linux, macOS, Windows and various BSDs!

It embeds Lua, and in June last year added SQLite too—so self-contained distributable web applications built with Redbean can now use Lua and SQLite for dynamic scripting. Performance sounds incredible: “redbean can serve 1 million+ gzip encoded responses per second on a cheap personal computer”.

# 17th February 2022, 6:01 am / c, lua, sqlite, redbean, cosmopolitan

A CGo-free port of SQLite. Fascinating Go version of SQLite, which uses Go code that has been translated from the original SQLite C using ccgo, a package by the same author which “translates cc ASTs to Go source code”. It claims to pass the full public SQLite test suite, which is very impressive.

# 30th January 2022, 10:25 pm / compilers, go, sqlite

SQLime: SQLite Playground (via) Anton Zhiyanov built this useful mobile-friendly online playground for trying things out it SQLite. It uses the sql.js library which compiles SQLite to WebAssembly, so it runs everything in the browser—but it also supports saving your work to Gists via the GitHub API. The JavaScript source code is fun to read: the site doesn’t use npm or Webpack or similar, opting instead to implement everything library-free using modern JavaScript modules and Web Components.

# 17th January 2022, 7:08 pm / web-components, webassembly, sqlite, javascript, anton-zhiyanov

Notes on Notes.app. Apple's Notes app keeps its data in a SQLite database at ~/Library/Group\ Containers/group.com.apple.notes/NoteStore.sqlite - but it's pretty difficult to extract data from. It turns out the note text is stored as a gzipped protocol buffers object in the ZICNOTEDATA.ZDATA column. Steve Dunham did the hard work of figuring out how it all works - the complexity stems from Apple's use of CRDT's to support seamless multiple edits from different devices.

# 9th December 2021, 10:39 pm / dogsheep, apple, sqlite, crdt

DuckDB-Wasm: Efficient Analytical SQL in the Browser (via) First SQLite, now DuckDB: options for running database engines in the browser using WebAssembly keep on growing. DuckDB means browsers now have a fast, intuitive mechanism for querying Parquet files too. This also supports the same HTTP Range header trick as the SQLite demo from a while back, meaning it can query large databases loaded over HTTP without downloading the whole file.

# 29th October 2021, 3:25 pm / parquet, duckdb, webassembly, sqlite, http-range-requests

SQLite: STRICT Tables (draft). Draft documentation for a feature that sounds like it could be arriving in SQLite 3.37 (the next release)—adding a “STRICT” table-option keyword to a CREATE TABLE statement will cause the table to strictly enforce typing rules for data in that table, rejecting inserts that fail to match the column’s datatypes.

I’ve seen many programmers dismiss SQLite due to its loose typing, so this feature is really exciting to me: it will hopefully remove a common objection to embracing SQLite for projects.

# 21st August 2021, 7:05 pm / sqlite

Bare columns in an aggregate queries. This is a really nice SQL tweak implemented in SQLite: If you run a query like “SELECT a, b, max(c) FROM tab1 GROUP BY a” SQLite will find the row with the highest value for c and use the columns of that row as the returned values for the other columns mentioned in the query.

# 10th August 2021, 1:29 am / sql, sqlite