Simon Willison’s Weblog
Last week’s sqlite-utils 3.10 introduced a huge new feature: the ability to run joins directly against CSV and JSON files from the command-line.
3.11 added a new --schema option to the sqlite-utils memory command which lets you see the schema you’ll be querying for the imported data:
3.12 focused on the Python library side of the package. It adds a new method, db.query(sql) which returns an iterator over Python dictionaries representing the results of a query.
This was a pretty obvious missing feature of the library: the rest of sqlite-utils deals with rows that are represented as dictionaries—you pass a list of Python dictionaries to db[table_name].insert_all(list_of_dicts) to create a table with the correct schema, for example. But if you wanted to execute SELECT queries you had to use db.exexcute() which would return a standard library cursor object which could then return tuples if you called .fetchall() on it.
It was only when I started to work on an interactive Jupyter notebook tutorial for sqlite-utils that I realized how weird it was not to have an equivalent method for reading data out of the database again.
