Datasette 0.56 has bug fixes and documentation improvements, plus some new documented internal APIs for plugin authors and SpatiaLite 5 bundled with the official Datasette Docker container.

Datasette 0.55 adds support for cross-database SQL queries. You can now run datasette --crossdb one.db two.db and then run queries that join data from tables in both of those database files - see cross-database queries in the documentation for more details.

sqlite-utils 3.6 adds similar features: a db.attach(alias, filepath) Python API method and --attach alias filepath.db command-line option, both for attaching additional databases in order to execute cross-database queries.

This new Video introduction to Datasette and sqlite-utils provides a full introduction to both Datasette and sqlite-utils in 17 minutes, including a live demo of creating a database from a CSV file and publishing it to Google Cloud Run.

Serving map tiles from SQLite with MBTiles and datasette-tiles. datasette-tiles is a new plugin that adds a tile server to Datasette, serving map tiles from databases that conform to the MBTiles specification. download-tiles is a tool for building these databases, and datasette-basemap is a plugin that bundles a 22MB SQLite database with OpenStreetMap tiles covering zoom levels 0-6 for the entire world.

Datasette 0.54 is out today. Highlights include the new _internal in-memory database exposing details of connected tables, plus support for JavaScript modules in plugins and add-on scripts. More commentary on this release is available in the annotated release notes.

Drawing shapes on a map to query a SpatiaLite database introduces the new datasette-leaflet-freedraw plugin, which adds support for drawing shapes on a map to specify a GeoJSON MultiPolygon that can be used to query SpatiaLite databases.

APIs from CSS without JavaScript: the datasette-css-properties plugin introduces datasette-css-properties, a highly experimental plugin that can output table rows and SQL query results as CSS stylesheets defining custom properties that can then be used to customize a static HTML page.

New on this site: a Datasette Tools directory and a search engine that covers documentation, tools, plugins, releases and more. The search engine uses Dogsheep Beta - I wrote about how that works in Building a search engine for datasette.io.

I wrote more about how this site works in Weeknotes: datasette.io, an official project website for Datasette.

Datasette 0.53 - datasette serve --create option, ?column__arraynotcontains= table filter, ?_header=off CSV option and updated links to reflect the new project website.

New Datasette project website - three years after the first release Datasette finally has its own website! The site includes project news, a plugin directory, use-cases and examples. The site is implemented using Datasette custom templates, and the source code is available on GitHub.

Datasette 0.52 - --config is now --setting, new database_actions plugin hook, datasette publish cloudrun --apt-get-install option and several bug fixes.

Datasette 0.51 - A new visual design, plugin hooks for adding navigation options, better handling of binary data, URL building utility methods and better support for running Datasette behind a proxy. Annotated release notes.

Datasette 0.50 - New column actions menu. datasette.client object for plugins to make internal API requests. Improved documentation on deploying Datasette. Annotated release notes.

Datasette 0.49 - JSON API for writable canned queries, path parameters for custom pages. See also Datasette 0.49: The annotated release notes.

• Correctly sign ?sql= on redirects created using DASHBOARD_UPGRADE_OLD_BASE64_LINKS. #68

• Fixed bug with DASHBOARD_UPGRADE_OLD_BASE64_LINKS setting. #67

• Make it easy to provide a custom base template. #7
• Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors header. #64
• Signing no longer uses base64/json. #45
• DASHBOARD_UPGRADE_OLD_BASE64_LINKS mechanism. #65

• SQL textarea now always has at least 5 rows
• Always strip trailing ; from SQL, fixing bug with "count" links. #56
• URLize links in results. #61

• Fixed bug with new --http-read-timeout feature

• Fix for bug with columns with identical names. #52
• DASHBOARD_ROW_LIMIT setting. #53
• Size SQL textarea to fit SQL. #51

• New --http-read-timeout option, thanks Eli Block! #14

• New --user-agent= option for passing a custom user-agent to Airtable. #12

Documentation improvements, bug fixes and support for SpatiaLite 5.

• The SQL editor can now be resized by dragging a handle. (#1236)
• Fixed a bug with JSON faceting and the __arraycontains filter caused by tables with spaces in their names. (#1239)
• Upgraded httpx dependency. (#1005)
• JSON faceting is now suggested even if a column contains blank strings. (#1246)
• New datasette.add_memory_database() method. (#1247)
• The Response.asgi_send() method is now documented. (#1266)
• The official Datasette Docker image now bundles SpatiaLite version 5. (#1278)
• Fixed a no such table: pragma_database_list bug when running Datasette against SQLite versions prior to SQLite 3.16.0. (#1276)
• HTML lists displayed in table cells are now styled correctly. Thanks, Bob Whitelock. (#1141, #1252)
• Configuration directory mode now correctly serves immutable databases that are listed in inspect-data.json. Thanks Campbell Allen and Frankie Robertson. (#1031, #1229)

• Better error message for --project that contains uppercase characters. #37
• Documentation on usage with GitHub Actions. #36