Simon Willison’s Weblog

Monarch Bear Grove on Niche Museums (via) Monarch Bear Grove is my favourite hidden corner of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It has stone circles formed from pieces of a Spanish monastery that was exported to the USA by press baron William Randolph Hearst. And there are druids. You should read the whole thing. (I added paragraph breaks for this using datasette-render-markdown—Niche Museums is basically a full-blown blog now.)

# 16th December 2019, 9:19 pm / projects, san-francisco, museums

datasette-template-sql (via) New Datasette plugin, celebrating the new ability in Datasette 0.32 to have asynchronous custom template functions in Jinja (which was previously blocked by the need to support Python 3.5). The plugin adds a sql() function which can be used to execute SQL queries that are embedded directly in custom templates.

# 15th November 2019, 12:59 am / projects, sql, templates, datasette, jinja

Datasette 0.31. Released today: this version adds compatibility with Python 3.8 and breaks compatibility with Python 3.5. Since Glitch support Python 3.7.3 now I decided I could finally give up on 3.5. This means Datasette can use f-strings now, but more importantly it opens up the opportunity to start taking advantage of Starlette, which makes all kinds of interesting new ASGI-based plugins much easier to build.

# 12th November 2019, 6:11 am / glitch, asgi, datasette, python, projects

sqlite-transform. I released a new CLI tool today: sqlite-transform, which lets you run “transformations” against a SQLite database. I built it out of frustration of constantly running into CSV files that use horrible American date formatting—the “sqlite-transform parsedatetime my.db mytable col1” command runs dateutil’s parser against those columns and replaces them with a nice, sortable ISO formatted timestamp. I’ve also added a “sqlite-transform lambda” command that lets you specify Python code directly on the command-line that should be used to transform every value in a specified column.

# 4th November 2019, 2:41 am / projects, sqlite

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

twitter-to-sqlite 0.6, with track and follow. I shipped a new release of my twitter-to-sqlite command-line tool this evening. It now includes experimental features for subscribing to the Twitter streaming API: you can track keywords or follow users and matching Tweets will be written to a SQLite database in real-time as they come in through the API. Since Datasette supports mutable databases now you can run Datasette against the database and run queries against the tweets as they are inserted into the tables.

# 6th October 2019, 4:54 am / realtime, projects, twitter, dogsheep

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

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

datasette-cors (via) My other Datasette ASGI plugin: this one wraps my asgi-cors project and lets you configure CORS access from a list of domains (or a set of domain wildcards) so you can make JavaScript calls to a Datasette instance from a specific set of other hosts.

# 8th July 2019, 4:30 am / projects, asgi, datasette, cors

datasette-auth-github (via) My first big ASGI plugin for Datasette: datasette-auth-github adds the ability to require users to authenticate against the GitHub OAuth API. You can whitelist specific users, or you can restrict access to members of specific GitHub organizations or teams. While it’s structured as a Datasette plugin it also includes ASGI middleware which can be applied to any ASGI application.

# 8th July 2019, 4:28 am / asgi, oauth, datasette, projects, github

Datasette 0.29 (via) I shipped Datasette 0.29! • ASGI all the way down! Plus a new asgi_wrapper plugin hook letting plugins do all kinds of powerful new things • New mechanism for secret plugin configuration options • Facet by date • ?_through= for joins through m2m tables. Much more.

# 8th July 2019, 4:26 am / projects, datasette

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

json-flatten. A little Python library I wrote that attempts to flatten a JSON object into a set of key/value pairs suitable for transmitting in a query string or using to construct an HTML form. I first wrote this back in 2015 as a Gist—I’ve reconstructed the Gist commit history in a new repository and shipped it to PyPI.

# 22nd June 2019, 4:51 am / projects, json, python

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

paginate-json (via) I released a fun tiny utility: paginate-json, which knows how to paginate through JSON APIs that use the HTTP Link header for pagination. I built it so I could pull data from the GitHub API and pipe it directly into SQLite via sqlite-utils.

# 12th June 2019, 3:22 pm / projects, webapis, json, sqlite-utils