Show HN: SQLite disk page explorer

This is really neat. I posted an animated GIF screenshot here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simonwillison.net&#x2F;2025&#x2F;Feb&#x2F;6&#x2F;sqlite-page-explorer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simonwillison.net&#x2F;2025&#x2F;Feb&#x2F;6&#x2F;sqlite-page-explorer&#x2F;</a>

Neat! It&#x27;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&#x27;d strongly recommend it for all the same reasons listed in the &quot;Why?&quot; section of the readme here.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sqlite.org&#x2F;fileformat.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sqlite.org&#x2F;fileformat.html</a>

That&#x27;s really impressive! As someone who&#x27;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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torymur.github.io&#x2F;sqlite-repr&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torymur.github.io&#x2F;sqlite-repr&#x2F;</a>

Did that for a security tool about more than ten years ago. Makes you love that tightly designed engine a bit more.<p>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.<p>Maybe add a color-legend to the front page? I didn&#x27;t know what the colors represented at first.<p>It&#x27;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: &quot;failed to run lua code: &#x2F;index.lua:3: module &#x27;utils&#x27; not found:&quot;.

Thank you!<p>As someone who isn&#x27;t disciplined enough to sit through a course or class, this was a really good way to visualize what&#x27;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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jabid.in&#x2F;2024&#x2F;11&#x2F;24&#x2F;sqlite.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jabid.in&#x2F;2024&#x2F;11&#x2F;24&#x2F;sqlite.html</a>

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.<p>Protip: Use WITHOUT ROWID with monotonic IDs if you don&#x27;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<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redbean.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redbean.dev&#x2F;</a><p>likely a bit outdated but:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;shmup&#x2F;awesome-cosmopolitan?tab=readme-ov-file#redbean">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;shmup&#x2F;awesome-cosmopolitan?tab=readme-ov-...</a>

Upvoted for using Redbean. I&#x27;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&#x27;re familiar with the unixy bits of it