Disinfodrome Adds Datasette Hosting

We can make SQL server dumps accessible.

Late last year a journalist presented me with a very complex SQL dump from an intrusion. I spent some time trying to get it to work with Airtable workalike NocoDB, but ultimately other things got in the way and the opportunity went stale.

Earlier this week I was reading Dubai Unlocked by OCCRP and I saw mention of Datasette. This system is trivially easy to install with Docker, you literally need five lines of code and a SQLite3 database to feed it. This is a Disinfodrome server with their sample Fixtures database on it.

Datasette requires the file system based SQLite3 as its data source, while most dumps are MySQL or MariaDB format. I really wrestled with this, but finally found a sed script that will turn a MariaDB dump to MySQL. Once the format is right, a single command loads the backup to MySQL, and another single line command connects to MySQL and writes a SQLite3 file from it.

I am going to pick a SQL dump from DDoSecrets that is broadly interesting to journalists and turn it into a Datasette demo, similar in spirit to what we do with Trump Russia PDFs and Open Semantic Search.

Conclusion:

This is a MAJOR upgrade to capability for Disinfodrome. We’ve been able to make large sets of documents accessible for years. We just gained that same ability with large scale tabular data.

I’ll just be over here, reading about the 46 tools and 157 plugins I have to support on this marvelous new system, if anyone should need me.