sqlite-utils has a fun feature that allows you to easily create sql schema from json or csv.

First we should make sure that we have sqlite3 and sqlite-utils installed.

brew install sqlite3 sqlite-utils

Lets say we have an external service that we want to store the data that comes back from an api request.

{
    "id": "E3A2E012-2BCB-4236-8D4B-98E1D0C7DE73",
    "first_name": "Shepard",
    "last_name": "Balshen",
    "email": "sbalshen0@feedburner.com",
    "update_at": 1648051756
}

Now we can use sqlite-utils to generate a new table to store the data from this request

cat response.json | sqlite-utils insert api-responses.db users -

Then we can easily check the schema to see how the table was created

sqlite-utils schema api-responses.db
CREATE TABLE [users] (
   [id] TEXT,
   [first_name] TEXT,
   [last_name] TEXT,
   [email] TEXT,
   [update_at] INTEGER
);

You might want to modify the schema to add, remove, or change columns or types but this should give a good starting point.

If you want to get even fancier you can pipe the api response directly from curl into sqlite-utils to make this even easier. For example if we had a slightly more complicated json response.

{
    "id": "E3A2E012-2BCB-4236-8D4B-98E1D0C7DE73",
    "first_name": "Shepard",
    "last_name": "Balshen",
    "email": "sbalshen0@feedburner.com",
    "activities": [
        { 
            "id": "4988998C-24C2-4874-932C-80B9B24CCD7C",
            "type": "bike",
            "time": 1648051756,
            "distance": 20
        },
        { 
            "id": "5013FDC9-B6CF-41AF-9E0C-84A9D3F8092D",
            "type": "run",
            "time": 1648051756,
            "distance": 8
        }
    ],
    "update_at": 1648051756
}

We can then pipe the response from the api request directly into jq and then into sqlite-utils to easily create a schema that can be used to store the data

curl -X GET -s localhost:8000 | \ 
jq '.activities[0]' | \
sqlite-utils insert activities.db activities -

sqlite-utils schema activities.db
CREATE TABLE [activities] (
   [id] TEXT,
   [type] TEXT,
   [time] INTEGER,
   [distance] INTEGER
);
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