This is really neat. I posted an animated GIF screenshot here https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/6/sqlite-page-explorer/

Neat! It's surprisingly easy to sit down with a copy of the sqlite file format docs and start writing code to parse sqlite files (like this project does), and I'd strongly recommend it for all the same reasons listed in the "Why?" section of the readme here.

https://www.sqlite.org/fileformat.html

That's really impressive! As someone who's worked with SQLite internals in the past, I know this kind of work and tinkering is no small feat. On a related note, I recently came across sqlite-repr [1] (built with Dioxus), which offers an interesting take on SQLite visualizations as well.

[1] https://torymur.github.io/sqlite-repr/

Did that for a security tool about more than ten years ago. Makes you love that tightly designed engine a bit more.

I always thought an explorer or just an base lib would be fun. Great to see yours, especially with a MIT license. Tbanks for sharing.

This looks cool, nice job.

Maybe add a color-legend to the front page? I didn't know what the colors represented at first.

It's kind of choking on a larger db (3.6GB, 942719 pages) - maybe you can paginate the pages.

Nice project, unfortunately when I run the executable it throws the error: "failed to run lua code: /index.lua:3: module 'utils' not found:".

Thank you!

As someone who isn't disciplined enough to sit through a course or class, this was a really good way to visualize what's going on under the hood, and how to structure my data more efficiently.

I recently wrote an explainer for the sqlite file format with some helpful diagrams. This might help.

https://blog.jabid.in/2024/11/24/sqlite.html

The sqlite source includes a CLI tool called showdb that is quite nice for poking around in database files

Neat. Being learning about databases and this is very helpful!

Tool works well.

A true masterpiece:)

It was revelatory to write an SQLite virtual filesystem module for a storage layer with extremely high latency (S3). Every seek matters. This would have helped; I looked at the reads executed by SQLite and tried to intuit what was going on inside the file.

Protip: Use WITHOUT ROWID with monotonic IDs if you don't want your rows sprayed randomly around the file! That one change was the difference between SQLite-on-S3 being unusably slow and being fast enough. WITHOUT ROWID tables let you manage the physical clustering.

redbean!! redbean is so good

https://redbean.dev/

likely a bit outdated but:

https://github.com/shmup/awesome-cosmopolitan?tab=readme-ov-...

Upvoted for using Redbean. I've been using it recently and it has been absolutely amazing, the built-in functionality that it has exposed through the Lua interface makes it an extensively programmable proxy that you can sandbox the crap out of if you're familiar with the unixy bits of it