Simon Willison’s Weblog

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81 items tagged “sqliteutils”

2021

Building a desktop application for Datasette (and weeknotes)

This week I started experimenting with a desktop application version of Datasette—with the goal of providing people who aren’t comfortable with the command-line the ability to get Datasette up and running on their own personal computers.

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Datasette on Codespaces, sqlite-utils API reference documentation and other weeknotes

This week I broke my streak of not sending out the Datasette newsletter, figured out how to use Sphinx for Python class documentation, worked out how to run Datasette on GitHub Codespaces, implemented Datasette column metadata and got tantalizingly close to a solution for an elusive Datasette feature.

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Adding Sphinx autodoc to a project, and configuring Read The Docs to build it. My TIL notes from figuring out how to use sphinx-autodoc for the sqlite-utils reference documentation today. # 11th August 2021, 1:21 am

sqlite-utils API reference (via) I released sqlite-utils 3.15.1 today with just one change, but it’s a big one: I’ve added docstrings and type annotations to nearly every method in the library, and I’ve started using sphinx-autodoc to generate an API reference page in the documentation directly from those docstrings. I’ve deliberately avoided building this kind of documentation in the past because I so often see projects where the class reference is the ONLY documentation, which I find makes it really hard to figure out how to actually use it. sqlite-utils already has extensive narrative prose documentation so in this case I think it’s a useful enhancement—especially since the docstrings and type hints can help improve the usability of the library in IDEs and Jupyter notebooks. # 11th August 2021, 1:03 am

Everything new in Datasette since January, plus Django SQL Dashboard. I sent out the first Datasette newsletter since late January this year, covering everything that’s new in Datasette and sqlite-utils this year and introducing Django SQL Dashboard. # 10th August 2021, 1:28 am

Apply conversion functions to data in SQLite columns with the sqlite-utils CLI tool

Earlier this week I released sqlite-utils 3.14 with a powerful new command-line tool: sqlite-utils convert, which applies a conversion function to data stored in a SQLite column.

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Weeknotes: sqlite-utils updates, Datasette and asgi-csrf, open-sourcing VIAL

Some work on sqlite-utils, asgi-csrf, a Datasette alpha and we open-sourced VIAL.

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Joining CSV and JSON data with an in-memory SQLite database

The new sqlite-utils memory command can import CSV and JSON data directly into an in-memory SQLite database, combine and query it using SQL and output the results as CSV, JSON or various other formats of plain text tables.

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Weeknotes: New releases across nine different projects

A new release and security patch for Datasette, plus releases of sqlite-utils, datasette-auth-passwords, django-sql-dashboard, datasette-upload-csvs, xml-analyser, datasette-placekey, datasette-mask-columns and db-to-sqlite.

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Weeknotes: Docker architectures, sqlite-utils 3.7, nearly there with Datasette 0.57

This week I learned a whole bunch about using Docker to emulate different architectures, released sqlite-utils 3.7 and made a ton of progress towards the almost-ready-to-ship Datasette 0.57.

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Cross-database queries in SQLite (and weeknotes)

I released Datasette 0.55 and sqlite-utils 3.6 this week with a common theme across both releases: supporting cross-database joins.

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Video introduction to Datasette and sqlite-utils

I put together a 17 minute video introduction to Datasette and sqlite-utils for FOSDEM 2021, showing how you can use Datasette to explore data, and demonstrating using the sqlite-utils command-line tool to convert a CSV file into a SQLite database, and then publish it using datasette publish. Here’s the video, plus annotated screen captures with further links and commentary.

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Weeknotes: Mostly messing around with map tiles

Most of what I worked on this week was covered in Serving map tiles from SQLite with MBTiles and datasette-tiles. I built two new plugins: datasette-tiles for serving map tiles, and datasette-basemap which bundles map tiles for zoom levels 0-6 of OpenStreetMap. I also released download-tiles for downloading tiles and bundling them into an MBTiles database.

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Weeknotes: datasette-export-notebook, PyInstaller packaged Datasette, CBSAs

What a terrible week. I’ve found it hard to concentrate on anything substantial. In a mostly futile attempt to distract myself from doomscrolling I’ve mainly been building some experimental output plugins, fiddling with PyInstaller and messing around with shapefiles.

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sqlite-utils 3.2 (via) As discussed in my weeknotes yesterday, this is the release of sqlite-utils that adds the new “cached table counts via triggers” mechanism. # 3rd January 2021, 9:25 pm

Weeknotes: A flurry of not-quite-finished features

My Christmas present to myself this year was to allow myself to spend a week working on stuff I found interesting, rather than sticking to the most important things. This may have been a mistake: it’s left me with a flurry of interesting but not-quite-finished features.

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2020

datasette.io, an official project website for Datasette

This week I launched datasette.io—the new official project website for Datasette.

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Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data

I gave a talk yesterday about personal data warehouses for GitHub’s OCTO Speaker Series, focusing on my Datasette and Dogsheep projects. The video of the talk is now available, and I’m presenting that here along with an annotated summary of the talk, including links to demos and further information.

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Weeknotes: sqlite-utils 3.0 alpha, Git scraping in the zeitgeist

Natalie and I decided to escape San Francisco for election week, and have been holed up in Fort Bragg on the Northern California coast. I’ve mostly been on vacation, but I did find time to make some significant changes to sqlite-utils. Plus notes on an exciting Git scraping project.

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Proof of concept: sqlite_utils magic for Jupyter (via) Tony Hirst has been experimenting with building a Jupyter “magic” that adds special syntax for using sqlite-utils to insert data and run queries. Query results come back as a Pandas DataFrame, which Jupyter then displays as a table. # 21st October 2020, 5:26 pm

Weeknotes: evernote-to-sqlite, Datasette Weekly, scrapers, csv-diff, sqlite-utils

This week I built evernote-to-sqlite (see Building an Evernote to SQLite exporter), launched the Datasette Weekly newsletter, worked on some scrapers and pushed out some small improvements to several other projects.

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Building an Evernote to SQLite exporter

I’ve been using Evernote for over a decade, and I’ve long wanted to export my data from it so I can do interesting things with it.

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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

Weeknotes: software carpentry, compiling modules for SQLite

This week I completed the Software Carpentry instructor training course, added two foundational features to sqlite-utils and learned how to compile modules for SQLite.

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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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Executing advanced ALTER TABLE operations in SQLite

SQLite’s ALTER TABLE has some significant limitations: it can’t drop columns (UPDATE: that was fixed in SQLite 3.35.0 in March 2021), it can’t alter NOT NULL status, it can’t change column types. Since I spend a lot of time with SQLite these days I’ve written some code to fix this—both from Python and as a command-line utility.

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Weeknotes: datasette-dump, sqlite-backup, talks

I spent some time this week digging into Python’s sqlite3 internals. I also gave two talks and recorded a third, due to air at PyGotham in October.

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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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sqlite-utils 2.14 (via) I finally figured out porter stemming with SQLite full-text search today—it turns out it’s as easy as adding tokenize=’porter’ to the CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE statement. So I just shipped sqlite-utils 2.14 with a tokenize= option (plus the ability to insert binary file data from stdin). # 1st August 2020, 9:19 pm