Fetching from the wire…
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Infra2026-08-12 · source-backed
Simon Willison shipped an alpha that turns an interactive-upload plugin into something programmable, with a formal API for uploading and atomically swapping databases on a running hosted Datasette (Simon Willison). "Rebuild the DB elsewhere, then hot-replace it" stops being a hack. If you publish read-only data, this is the pattern.
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Willison launched datasette-apps (0.1a2) on June 18, hosting self-contained HTML+JS apps in a sandboxed iframe that run SQL against your data, read-only by default. He frames it as "Claude Artifacts reimagined for Datasette," artifacts backed by a JSON API to a relational data...
His conclusion is DuckDB matches or beats SQLite's safety for untrusted queries, but only with enable_external_access=false, lock_configuration=true, and a watchdog thread, since DuckDB lacks SQLite's opcode-based query timeouts. He ships a safe_duckdb.py helper and a Datasett...
The 8-years-planned migration landed this weekend via a 735-line, 30-commit change, and notably ended on SQLite instead of the PostgreSQL originally targeted in 2018. The site now runs a 3.8GB content DB plus separate cache, queue, and security databases on a single box, with...
Willison shipped datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0 on June 7, letting agents perform structured data edits inside Datasette, alongside micropython-wasm sandbox work for running untrusted agent code. Separately his evolving Agentic Engineering Patterns guide reframes the work around t...
Prompted by Julia Evans admitting on July 17 that she still can't read query plans, Willison had Fable build a tool that runs arbitrary SQL against a SQLite database and renders both EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN and the lower-level EXPLAIN bytecode with per-line plain-English annotation...
Simon Willison shipped 1.0a35 on June 23 with in-browser "Create table" and "Alter table" interfaces backed by stable JSON schema APIs, plus template context promoted to a stable public API. It pushes Datasette from read-only publishing toward an editable, scriptable database...
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