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Annotated version of this introductory video

Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape, analyze and explore it, and publish it as an interactive website and accompanying API.

Datasette is aimed at data journalists, museum curators, archivists, local governments, scientists, researchers and anyone else who has data that they wish to share with the world. It is part of a wider ecosystem of 46 tools and 153 plugins dedicated to making working with structured data as productive as possible.

Try a demo and explore 33,000 power plants around the world, then follow the tutorial or take a look at some other examples of Datasette in action.

Then read how to get started with Datasette, subscribe to the monthly-ish newsletter and consider signing up for office hours for an in-person conversation about the project.

New: Datasette Desktop - a macOS desktop application for easily running Datasette on your own computer!

Exploratory data analysis

Import data from CSVs, JSON, database connections and more. Datasette will automatically show you patterns in your data and help you share your findings with your colleagues.

Instant data publishing

datasette publish lets you instantly publish your data to hosting providers like Google Cloud Run, Heroku or Vercel.

Rapid prototyping

Spin up a JSON API for any data in minutes. Use it to prototype and prove your ideas without building a custom backend.

Latest news

18th February 2024 #

Datasette 1.0a10 is a focused alpha that changes some internal details about how Datasette handles transactions. The datasette.execute_write_fn() internal method now wraps the function in a database transaction unless you pass transaction=False.

16th February 2024 #

Datasette 1.0a9 adds basic alter table support to the JSON API, tweaks how permissions works and introduces some new plugin debugging utilities.

7th February 2024 #

Datasette 1.0a8 introduces several new plugin hooks, a JavaScript plugin system and moves plugin configuration from metadata.yaml to datasette.yaml. Read more about the release in the annotated release notes for 1.0a8.

1st December 2023 #

Datasette Enrichments is a new feature for Datasette that supports enriching data by running custom code against every selected row in a table. Read Datasette Enrichments: a new plugin framework for augmenting your data for more details, plus a video demo of enrichments for geocoding addresses and processing text and images using GPT-4.

30th November 2023 #

datasette-comments is a new plugin by Alex Garcia which adds collaborative commenting to Datasette. Alex built the plugin for Datasette Cloud, but it's also available as an open source package for people who are hosting their own Datasette instances. See Annotate and explore your data with datasette-comments on the Datasette Cloud blog for more details.

22nd August 2023 #

Datasette 1.0a4 has a fix for a security vulnerability in the Datasette 1.0 alpha series: the API explorer interface exposed the names of private databases and tables in public instances that were protected by a plugin such as datasette-auth-passwords, though not the actual content of those tables. See the security advisory for more details and workarounds for if you can't upgrade immediately. The latest edition of the Datasette Newsletter also talks about this issue.

15th August 2023 #

datasette-write-ui: a Datasette plugin for editing, inserting, and deleting rows introduces a new plugin adding add/edit/delete functionality to Datasette, developed by Alex Garcia. Alex built this for Datasette Cloud, and this post is the first announcement made on the new Datasette Cloud blog - see also Welcome to Datasette Cloud.

9th August 2023 #

Datasette 1.0a3 is an alpha release of Datasette that previews the new default JSON API design that’s coming in version 1.0 - the single most significant change planned for that 1.0 release.

1st July 2023 #

New tutorial: Data analysis with SQLite and Python. This tutorial, originally presented at PyCon 2023, includes a 2h45m video and an extensive handout that should be useful with or without the video. Topics covered include Python's sqlite3 module, sqlite-utils, Datasette, Datasette Lite, advanced SQL patterns and more.

24th March 2023 #

I built a ChatGPT plugin to answer questions about data hosted in Datasette describes a new experimental Datasette plugin to enable people to query data hosted in a Datasette interface via ChatGPT, asking human language questions that are automatically converted to SQL and used to generate a readable response.

23rd February 2023 #

Using Datasette in GitHub Codespaces is a new tutorial showing how Datasette can be run in GitHub's free Codespaces browser-based development environments, using the new datasette-codespaces plugin.

28th January 2023 #

Examples of sites built using Datasette now includes screenshots of Datasette deployments that illustrate a variety of problems that can be addressed using Datasette and its plugins.

13th January 2023 #

Semantic search answers: Q&A against documentation with GPT3 + OpenAI embeddings shows how Datasette can be used to implement semantic search and build a system for answering questions against an existing corpus of text, using two new plugins: datasette-openai and datasette-faiss, and a new tool: openai-to-sqlite.

9th January 2023 #

Datasette 0.64 is out, and includes a strong warning against running SpatiaLite in production without disabling arbitrary SQL queries, plus a new --setting default_allow_sql off setting to make it easier to do that. See Datasette 0.64, with a warning about SpatiaLite for more about this release. A new tutorial, Building a location to time zone API with SpatiaLite, describes how to safely use SpatiaLite and Datasette to build and deploy an API for looking up time zones for a latitude/longitude location.

15th December 2022 #

Datasette 1.0a2: Upserts and finely grained permissions describes the new upsert API and much improved permissions capabilities introduced in the latest Datasette 1.0a2 alpha release.

All news

Latest releases

19th March 2024

datasette-enrichments 0.3.1 - Tools for running enrichments against data stored in Datasette

  • Fix for a bug where the row action menu did not work correctly for tables with primary keys starting with an underscore. #42

18th March 2024

datasette-write 0.3.2 - Datasette plugin providing a UI for writing to a database

  • Removed unnecessary print() debug statement.

17th March 2024

datasette-enrichments 0.3 - Tools for running enrichments against data stored in Datasette

16th March 2024

datasette-packages 0.2.1 - Show a list of currently installed Python packages

  • Switch from pkg_resources to importlib.metadata to fix a deprecation warning. Dropped support for Python 3.7. #6

datasette-export-database 0.2.1

  • Temporary files created for the user to download are now deleted after the download finishes, and any stale ones are cleared out when Datasette first starts running. #5

15th March 2024

datasette-export-database 0.2

  • Database action menu now shows the size of the database in the menu item description. #3
  • Confirm that signed URL token is from the same user based on their csrftoken cookie. #4

datasette-export-database 0.1.1

  • Fix for NameError: name 'Permission' is not defined error. #2

datasette-export-database 0.1

  • Initial release. Users with the export-database permission gain the ability to export a snapshot of a database from an option in the database action menu. #1

14th March 2024

datasette-configure-fts 1.1.3 - Datasette plugin for enabling full-text search against selected table columns

  • Added a description to the table action menu item for Datasette 1.0a13 and higher.

datasette-upload-csvs 0.9.1 - Datasette plugin for uploading CSV files and converting them to database tables

  • Fixed incorrect page title on the upload page. #40
  • Added a description to the database action menu item for Datasette 1.0a13 and higher.

datasette-write 0.3.1 - Datasette plugin providing a UI for writing to a database

  • Added a description to the database action menu item for Datasette 1.0a13 and higher.

datasette-edit-schema 0.8a1 - Datasette plugin for modifying table schemas

  • To rename a table users must now have drop-table permission for the old name and create-table permission for the new name. #60
  • Action menu items now have descriptions in addition to labels.

13th March 2024

datasette-extract 0.1a3 - Import unstructured data (text and images) into structured tables

  • Extraction jobs can now provide additional instructions to pass to the model, which are persisted and suggested for reuse when data is imported into the table in the future. #17

datasette 1.0a13 - An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data

Each of the key concepts in Datasette now has an actions menu, which plugins can use to add additional functionality targeting that entity.

  • Plugin hook: view_actions() for actions that can be applied to a SQL view. (#2297)
  • Plugin hook: homepage_actions() for actions that apply to the instance homepage. (#2298)
  • Plugin hook: row_actions() for actions that apply to the row page. (#2299)
  • Action menu items for all of the *_actions() plugin hooks can now return an optional "description" key, which will be displayed in the menu below the action label. (#2294)
  • Plugin hooks documentation page is now organized with additional headings. (#2300)
  • Improved the display of action buttons on pages that also display metadata. (#2286)
  • The header and footer of the page now uses a subtle gradient effect, and options in the navigation menu are better visually defined. (#2302)
  • Table names that start with an underscore now default to hidden. (#2104)
  • pragma_table_list has been added to the allow-list of SQLite pragma functions supported by Datasette. select * from pragma_table_list() is no longer blocked. (#2104)

9th March 2024

datasette-enrichments-quickjs 0.1a1 - Enrich data with a custom JavaScript function

  • QuickJS functions now run with a 4MB memory limit, avoiding potential crashes if code tries to allocate too much memory. #4

All releases