simonw

sqlite-utils

Python2019–2026

simonw / sqlite-utils

sqlite-utils

Python CLI utility and library for manipulating SQLite databases

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12Distinct people

35Mentions

1Explicit recommenders

2.2KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Python CLI utility and library for manipulating SQLite databases

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I love black: formatting isn't a _big_ thing to think about, but it's always there. Until black. For [current project] it's hooked into VS Code as the default formatter, and…

genmon used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

simonw/datasette · linked in 6 of the same discussions
simonw/llm · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 6:01:08 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year35 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-05-17 16:36:50 UTC to 2026-08-05 02:35:12 UTC.

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	1	2
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	6	0	6
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	9	1	8
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	4	0	4
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	0	2
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	0	2
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	8	0	8

What Hacker News says

8 sources

simonw·Aug 5, 2026

How's this? https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/13/datasette-code-frequen... I have similar charts across my three main open source projects: https://github.com/simonw/datasette/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/simonw/llm/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/graphs/code-frequency

In Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

simonw·Jul 12, 2026

Right, the transcript is linked from the issue: https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/issues/787#issuecomme... As far as I can tell I've shared more prompt transcripts than anyone else. Happy to be proven wrong about that. Look through my commit history on https://github.com/simonw/tools/commits and https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/commits and https://github.com/simonw/datasette/commits and you'll see that commits that were AI-assisted almost all link to a transcript or include a prompt or both.

In Prefer strict tables in SQLite

cowboylowrez·Jul 12, 2026

"Enforce authoritarian type-checking when inserting new content into tables" lol you can really get into the mindset by reading these threads. I think having the strict defaultable at the database level seems like a good option, maybe they think everyone will pile into the new default and leave the old databases in a state of decaying disrepair? My only experience with versionitus type things is with microsoft sql and other "enterprisey" things that used it and its hard enough without huge upgrade blockers like text in an integer field lol still they're willing to add the default to the table create statement. I'm thinking that sqlite folks feel that things like type safety, database consistency are disliked authoritarian attributes, and I'm sure thats a consideration in letting old code touch databases that old code doesn't understand. I

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ts wierd that they didn't like having a pragma for any new table creation even at the database level but they allow this problem factory: "Because of a quirk in the SQL language parser, versions of SQLite prior to 3.37.0 can still read and write STRICT tables if they set "PRAGMA writable_schema=ON" immediately after opening the database file, prior to doing anything else that requires knowing the schema." https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/issues/344#issuecomme... I guess for ID reuse a rationalization could be that theres only so many integer values that can fit into a certain number of bytes haha

In Prefer strict tables in SQLite

simonw·Jul 12, 2026

Thanks for the nudge, I just added a new test explicitly covering this: https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/commit/d71420065903ff...

In Prefer strict tables in SQLite

simonw·Jul 12, 2026

It uses "PRAGMA foreign_keys=0" and "PRAGMA defer_foreign_keys= ON" before running the transformation, then resets those settings afterwards: https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/blob/3f0471701b5f8c7d... That's the pattern recommended by SQLite here: https://www.sqlite.org/lang_altertable.html#otheralter

In Prefer strict tables in SQLite

simonw·Jul 10, 2026

The test coverage of sqlite-utils is solid - pytest-cov reports 95% total. The project has 9,973 lines of implementation code and 14,860 of test code. Here's the delete_where() test: https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/blob/7a52214624ae0e2c... The problem with the test was that it asserted that the records were deleted inside of the same transaction as the delete, so it missed the changed behavior where the delete didn't commit properly (it had committed properly prior to the new transactions work).

In sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable (for about $149.25)

westurner·Feb 23, 2026

Though the README is probably enough context, would there be value in an agent skill for this? https://agentskills.io/what-are-skills SKILL.md format: https://agentskills.io/specification#skill-md-format The skill creator skill SKILL.md: https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/skill-... . SWE bench involves solving GitHub issues. Which of the SWE bench agents read from or write to GitHub issues? . There could be a local cache of remote issues, and/or an overlayfs-like write cache From https://github.com/GothenburgBitFactory/bugwarrior : > bugwarrior - Pull tickets from github, bitbucket, bugzilla, jira, trac, and others into taskwarrior https://github.com/bergercookie/syncall : > Bi-directional synchronization between services such as Taskwarrior, Google Calendar, Notion, Asana, and more . ditz is on the filesystem ditz: h

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ttps://github.com/jashmenn/ditz : > Ditz is a simple, light-weight distributed issue tracker designed to work with distributed version control systems like git, darcs, Mercurial, and Bazaar git-ditz: https://github.com/ihrke/git-ditz . sqlite-utils does SQLite FTS full text search config. There are additional tables for FTS indexes. sqlite-utils: https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils sqlite-utils > Configuring full-text search: https://sqlite-utils.datasette.io/en/stable/cli.html#configu... : sqlite-utils enable-fts mydb.db documents title summary # after subsequent writes sqlite-utils populate-fts mydb.db documents title summary # rebuild the FTS indexes sqlite-utils rebuild-fts mydb.db documents . One of these mentions sensitivity analysis and basically cache poisoning; From "I built a memory system for Claude that solves the context loss issue" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45546276 : - buildautomata_memory_mcp: https://github.com/brucepro/buildautomata_memory_mcp Notes from "Show HN: Recall: Give Claude memory with Redis-backed persistent context" a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45517613 : - recall: https://github.com/joseairosa/recall sediment: https://github.com/rendro/sediment : > Semantic memory for AI agents. Local-first, MCP-native sediment-benchmark: https://github.com/rendro/sediment-benchmark : > Benchmark suite for memory systems (Sediment, ChromaDB, Mem0, Letta)

In Show HN: Saga – A Jira-like project tracker MCP server for AI agents (SQLite)

randito·Jan 24, 2026

Great link. I've always been drawn to sqlite3 just from a simplicity and operational point of view. And with tools like "make it easy to replcate" Litestream and "make it easy to use" sqlite-utils, it just becomes easier. And one of the first patterns I wanted to use was this. Just a read-only event log that's replicated, that is very easy to understand and operate. Kafka is a beast to manage and run. We picked it at my last company -- and it was a mistake, when a simple DB would have sufficed. https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils https://litestream.io/

In Small Kafka: Tansu and SQLite on a free t3.micro