alchemy-utils 0.1a0

Simon Willison's alchemy-utils is an alpha-stage attempt to bring the data-handling operations of sqlite-utils to multiple database engines. The release post shows it reading rows from PostgreSQL and importing a CSV into DuckDB, automatically creating a table structure to match the file. That second example combines loading the data and defining its columns in one operation.

Willison reports that optimizing this particular CSV import reduced its runtime from nearly an hour to about 35 seconds. That is a useful account of improving one workflow, with the scope limited to the reported run rather than a benchmark across databases.

“I've long pondered what a database agnostic version of my sqlite-utils Python library and CLI utility might look like.”

“Do a research spike to see what it would take to build a library with the same core API as SQLite-utils - in particular the insert and upsert and insert_all and upsert_all and create and update methods, and the table introspection stuff - but backed by SQLalchemy so it works for multiple database engines”

“It took very few follow-up prompts to produce this project in a state good enough to release as an alpha.”

“That one took nearly an hour the first time I ran it, so I had Codex optimize it and got it down to around 35 seconds.”