Article · 2026-07-06 · 3 moments

sqlite-utils 4.0rc3

Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc3 I hoped to release sqlite-utils 4.0 stable this weekend, but as I worked through the backlog of issues and PRs with a combination of Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.5 the changeling since rc2 kept getting bigger. The biggest new feature is support for introspecting and creating compound foreign keys - a feature that involves a subtle breaking change to table.foreign_keys and hence needed to land for the 4.0 stable release. sqlite-utils also now follows SQLite's c ✦ AI generated

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HOST Simon Willison

Anecdote

As I worked through the backlog of issues and PRs with a combination of Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.5, the changelog since rc2 kept getting bigger, so I couldn't release sqlite-utils 4.0 stable this weekend as hoped.

The author intended to ship sqlite-utils 4.0 stable this weekend, but working through the backlog with Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.5 kept expanding the changelog, pushing the release back to rc3.

transcript

Simon Willison: I hoped to release sqlite-utils 4.0 stable this weekend, but as I worked through the backlog of issues and PRs with a combination of Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.5 the changeling since rc2 kept getting bigger.

Fact◆

sqlite-utils now follows SQLite's own convention for treating column names as case insensitive, a change that turned out to touch a bunch of different places in the codebase.

To align with SQLite's built-in case-insensitive column naming, sqlite-utils had to modify multiple areas of its code, not just a single localized fix.

transcript

Simon Willison: sqlite-utils also now follows SQLite's convention for case insensitive column names, which turned out to touch a bunch of different places at once.

Fact◆

The biggest new feature in this release is support for introspecting and creating compound foreign keys, and because that involves a subtle breaking change to table.foreign_keys, it had to land before the 4.0 stable release.

sqlite-utils gains support for compound foreign keys, a feature significant enough that its accompanying breaking change to table.foreign_keys had to be included in the 4.0 stable milestone rather than deferred.

transcript

Simon Willison: The biggest new feature is support for introspecting and creating compound foreign keys - a feature that involves a subtle breaking change to table.foreign_keys and hence needed to land for the 4.0 stable release.

Highlight slides

Compound Foreign Keys Land Before 4.0✦ from: The biggest new feature in this release is support for introspecting and creating compound foreign keys, and because that involves a subtle breaking change to table.foreign_keys, it had to land before the 4.0 stable release.sqlite-utils adopts case-insensitive column names✦ from: sqlite-utils now follows SQLite's own convention for treating column names as case insensitive, a change that turned out to touch a bunch of different places in the codebase.Why It Couldn't Wait✦ from: The biggest new feature in this release is support for introspecting and creating compound foreign keys, and because that involves a subtle breaking change to table.foreign_keys, it had to land before the 4.0 stable release.

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