Datasette

Datasette is an open-source tool for exploring data and publishing it as interactive websites and JSON APIs. It serves journalists, researchers, archivists and other data publishers, helping them analyze and share information without building a custom backend. Datasette Agent adds conversational analysis of SQLite databases through an extensible plugin, supporting hosted language models and models running on users’ own hardware.

Creator Simon Willison, a co-creator of Django, released Datasette’s first public version in 2017 and continues building tools around Datasette and SQLite. Its original design bundled read-only SQLite databases with the application and included database-content hashes in URLs so responses could be cached across browsers and intermediary services. The project has since expanded beyond read-only publishing: its 1.0 alpha releases support permission-controlled SQL writes and stored queries that users can keep private or share.

Datasette for Newsrooms, a product suite from Datasette Cloud, brings data storage, search and collaboration together for investigative journalists and data teams. Teams can turn unstructured material into searchable tables with AI, run SQL in the browser, visualize results and collaborate through comments and mentions. Reporters can use saved queries independently, while publishing tables or selected query results gives readers access to the data behind a story.