Simon Willison’s Weblog

Bedrock: The SQLitening (via) Back in March 2018 www.mozilla.org switched over to running on Django using SQLite! They’re using the same pattern I’ve been exploring with Datasette: their SQLite database is treated as a read-only cache by their frontend servers, and a new SQLite database is built by a separate process and fetched onto the frontend machines every five minutes by a scheduled task. They have a healthcheck page which shows the latest version of the database and when it was fetched, and even lets you download the 25MB SQLite database directly (I’ve been exploring it using Datasette).

# 7th October 2020, 11:47 pm / django, mozilla, sqlite, datasette, baked-data

Running Datasette on DigitalOcean App Platform (via) I spent some time with DigitalOcean’s new App Platform today, which is a Heroku-style PaaS that starts at $5/month. It looks like it could be a really good fit for Datasette. Disk is ephemeral, but if you’re publishing read-only data that doesn’t matter since you can build the SQLite database as part of the deployment and bundle it up in the Docker/Kubernetes container.

# 7th October 2020, 2:52 am / deployment, heroku, datasette, digitalocean

Potential new elevator pitch / tagline for Datasette: The best way to publish data online (via) One of the biggest challenges I’ve had with Datasette is compressing it into a single elevator pitch or tagline that helps answer the question “what does this software do?”—the project does a lot of different things, so finding the right angle for explaining it has proved really difficult. I’m workshopping a new tagline over on the Datasette discussion forum—feedback, suggestions and challenges very welcome!

# 4th October 2020, 12:03 am / marketing, pitching, datasette

datasette-dateutil (via) New Datasette plugin exposing date/time parsing custom SQL functions powered by the classic dateutil Python library.

# 28th September 2020, 12:33 am / dateutil, plugins, projects, datasette