Thread by @simonw

Announcing Django SQL Dashboard, now out of alpha and ready for people to try out on their own Django+PostgreSQL projects: simonwillison.net/2021/May/10/dj…

The key idea here is to bring some of the most valuable features of Datasette to any Django+PostgreSQL project

You can execute read-only SQL queries interactively, bookmark and share the results, and write queries that produce bar charts, progress bars and even word clouds too

I recorded a three minute video demo which shows the tool in action

My post includes a delightfully convoluted example: a SQL query which searches just the code examples I've posted to my blog, using a PostgreSQL regular expression to extract any <pre>...</pre> blocks and strip extraneous HTML!

Try it here: simonwillison.net/dashboard/code…

I think this is the most interesting idea embedded in both Django SQL Dashboard and Datasette: the ability to build an entire custom application (in this case search within code examples) as a single bookmarkable SQL query

So much of what we do as web developers can be boiled down to building a custom, templated interface on top of the results of a SQL query - so being able to do that with a bookmark is an enormous productivity boost!

If anyone wants to create custom visualization widgets for this it's very straight-forward: create a new Django template with a filename that matches the columns you want to visualize: django-sql-dashboard.datasette.io/en/latest/widg…

Having this kind of interface available is a big productivity boost for maintenance development - means you can instantly answer questions like "how many people have used this feature?" or "are there any records exhibiting this edge-case?" - and link to the query from the issue

I find that for most of the coding I do these days I spend 80% of the time on research and 20% of the time on actually typing code - gathering notes on how things work using bookmarked SQL queries fits my development process really well