issue_comments

I was wondering if you have any more thoughts on this? I have a tangible use case now: adding a "vector" column to a database to support semantic search using doc2vec embeddings (example; note that the vtfunc package may no longer be reliable...).

Wondering if this actually relates to https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/issues/402 ?

I also wonder if this would be a sensible approach for eg registering pint based quantity conversions into and out of the db, perhaps storing the quantity as a serialised magnitude measurement single column string?

The CustomColumnType() approach looks good. This pushes you into the mindspace that you are defining and working with a custom column type.

When creating the table, you could then error, or at least warn, if someone wasn't setting a column on a type or a custom column type, which I guess is where mypy comes in?

Allowing custom strings in the create() method, as you suggest in your example, feels like a reasonable way to support this. python db["dummy"].create({ "title": str, "vector": "array", }) I'm slightly nervous about that just because people might accidentally use this without realizig what they are doing - passing "column-name": "string" for example when they should have used "column-name": str in order to get a TEXT column.

Alternatively, this could work:

python db["dummy"].create({ "title": str, "vector": CustomColumnType("array") }) This would play better with mypy too I think.

I had no idea this was possible! I guess SQLite will allow any text string as the column type, defaulting to TEXT as the underlying default representation if it doesn't recognize the type.