The Datasette Ecosystem#

Datasette sits at the center of a growing ecosystem of open source tools aimed at making it as easy as possible to gather, analyze and publish interesting data.

These tools are divided into two main groups: tools for building SQLite databases (for use with Datasette) and plugins that extend Datasette's functionality.

The Datasette project website includes a directory of plugins and a directory of tools:

sqlite-utils#

sqlite-utils is a key building block for the wider Datasette ecosystem. It provides a collection of utilities for manipulating SQLite databases, both as a Python library and a command-line utility. Features include:

  • Insert data into a SQLite database from JSON, CSV or TSV, automatically creating tables with the correct schema or altering existing tables to add missing columns.

  • Configure tables for use with SQLite full-text search, including creating triggers needed to keep the search index up-to-date.

  • Modify tables in ways that are not supported by SQLite's default ALTER TABLE syntax - for example changing the types of columns or selecting a new primary key for a table.

  • Adding foreign keys to existing database tables.

  • Extracting columns of data into a separate lookup table.

Dogsheep#

Dogsheep is a collection of tools for personal analytics using SQLite and Datasette. The project provides tools like github-to-sqlite and twitter-to-sqlite that can import data from different sources in order to create a personal data warehouse. Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data is a talk that explains Dogsheep and demonstrates it in action.