Simon Willison’s Weblog

Mainly a fix for an edge case that regular Claude chat spotted while experimenting with the 4.1 release to answer a question about ON DELETE.

• table.transform() now raises a TransactionError if called while a transaction is open with PRAGMA foreign_keys enabled and the table is referenced by foreign keys with destructive ON DELETE actions - CASCADE, SET NULL or SET DEFAULT. The pragma cannot be changed inside a transaction, so previously dropping the old table as part of the transform could fire those actions and silently delete or modify referencing rows. See Foreign keys and transactions for details and workarounds. (#794)
• The CLI and Python API documentation now cross-reference each other: CLI sections link to the equivalent Python API functionality and Python API sections link back to the corresponding CLI command. (#791)

The first dot-release since 4.0 a few days ago, introducing a number of minor new features.

• sqlite-utils insert and sqlite-utils upsert now accept a --code option for providing a block of Python code (or a path to a .py file) that defines a rows() function or rows iterable of rows to insert, as an alternative to importing from a file. (#684)

sqlite-utils already had features that allow you to pass blocks of Python code as CLI arguments, for example this one for the sqlite-utils convert command:

sqlite-utils convert content.db articles headline '
def convert(value):
    return value.upper()'

Allowing blocks of code to generate new rows directly was on obvious extension of that pattern:

sqlite-utils insert data.db creatures --code '
def rows():
    yield {"id": 1, "name": "Cleo"}
    yield {"id": 2, "name": "Suna"}
' --pk id

• sqlite-utils insert and sqlite-utils upsert now accept --type column-name type to override the type automatically chosen when the table is created. This is useful for CSV or TSV columns such as ZIP codes that look like integers but should be stored as TEXT to preserve leading zeros. (#131)

A long-standing feature request which turned out to be a simple implementation.

• New table.drop_index(name) method and sqlite-utils drop-index command for dropping an index by name. Both accept ignore=True/--ignore to ignore a missing index. (#626)
• sqlite-utils query can now read the SQL query from standard input by passing - in place of the query, for example echo "select * from dogs" | sqlite-utils query dogs.db -. (#765)

Two more small features. I had Codex review all open issues and highlight the easiest ones!

• sqlite-utils upsert can now infer the primary key of an existing table, so --pk can be omitted when upserting into a table that already has a primary key.

Another Codex suggestion, an obvious missing CLI feature from a Python library improvement that shipped in the 4.0 release.

• table.transform() and table.transform_sql() now accept strict=True or strict=False to change a table’s SQLite strict mode. Omitting the option preserves the existing mode. (#787)
• The sqlite-utils transform command now accepts --strict and --no-strict to change a table’s strict mode. (#787)

These two were inspired by Prefer STRICT tables in SQLite by Evan Hahn, which did the rounds on Hacker News today. Evan pointed out that:

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a way to ALTER a table to make it strict. I think you have to copy the data out of the non-strict table into the strict one.

That's exactly what the sqlite-utils transform mechanism does, so I extended it to add the ability to switch tables from strict to non-strict and vice-versa.

Here's the GPT-5.6 Sol xhigh Codex transcript I used to implement those new strict table features. One of the most useful prompts I ran was this one:

use uv run python -c and manually exercise the new .transform(strict=) option, see if you can find any edge-cases or bugs

Effectively telling the model to manually test its work, outside of the automated tests it had already written. This turned up two minor issues that we then fixed.

The version that retires the library, instead implementing a compatibility shim against the new sqlite-utils 4.0 dependency.

See sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations for details.

The last RC before the 4.0 stable release. Mainly implements feedback from a detailed review by Claude Fable 5.

I hoped to release sqlite-utils 4.0 stable this weekend, but as I worked through the backlog of issues and PRs with a combination of Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.5 the changelog since rc2 kept getting bigger.

The biggest new feature is support for introspecting and creating compound foreign keys - a feature that involves a subtle breaking change to table.foreign_keys and hence needed to land for the 4.0 stable release.

sqlite-utils also now follows SQLite's convention for case insensitive column names, which turned out to touch a bunch of different places at once.

See sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 adds migrations and nested transactions.

• Plugins can now reuse the implementation of the sqlite-utils memory CLI command with the new return_db=True parameter. (#643)
• table.transform() now recreates indexes after transforming a table. A new sqlite_utils.db.TransformErrorexception is raised if these indexes cannot be recreated due to conflicting changes to the table such as a column rename. Thanks, Mat Miller. (#633)
• table.search() now accepts a include_rank=True parameter, causing the resulting rows to have a rank column showing the calculated relevance score. Thanks, liunux4odoo. (#628)
• Fixed an error that occurred when creating a strict table with at least one floating point column. These FLOATcolumns are now correctly created as REAL as well, but only for strict tables. (#644)