id,node_id,number,title,user,state,locked,assignee,milestone,comments,created_at,updated_at,closed_at,author_association,pull_request,body,repo,type,active_lock_reason,performed_via_github_app,reactions,draft,state_reason
777333388,MDU6SXNzdWU3NzczMzMzODg=,1168,Mechanism for storing metadata in _metadata tables,9599,open,0,,,21,2021-01-01T18:47:27Z,2023-09-28T18:29:05Z,,OWNER,,"_Original title: Perhaps metadata should all live in a `_metadata` in-memory database_

Inspired by #1150 - metadata should be exposed as an API, and for large Datasette instances that API may need to be paginated. So why not expose it through an in-memory database table?

One catch to this: plugins. #860 aims to add a plugin hook for metadata. But if the metadata comes from an in-memory table, how do the plugins interact with it?

The need to paginate over metadata does make a plugin hook that returns metadata for an individual table seem less wise, since we don't want to have to do 10,000 plugin hook invocations to show a list of all metadata.

If those plugins write directly to the in-memory table how can their contributions survive the server restarting?",107914493,issue,,,"{""url"": ""https://api.github.com/repos/simonw/datasette/issues/1168/reactions"", ""total_count"": 0, ""+1"": 0, ""-1"": 0, ""laugh"": 0, ""hooray"": 0, ""confused"": 0, ""heart"": 0, ""rocket"": 0, ""eyes"": 0}",,
642572841,MDU6SXNzdWU2NDI1NzI4NDE=,859,Database page loads too slowly with many large tables (due to table counts),3243482,open,0,,,21,2020-06-21T14:23:17Z,2021-08-25T21:59:55Z,,CONTRIBUTOR,,"Hey,
I have a database that I save in HTML from couple of web scrapers. There are around 200k+, 50+ rows in a couple of tables, with sqlite file weighing around 600MB.

The app runs on a VPS with 2 core CPU, 4GB RAM and refreshing database page regularly takes more than 10 seconds. I was suspecting that counting tables was the culprit, but manually running `select count(*) from table_name` for the largest table finishes under a second.

I've looked at the source code. There's a check for index page for mutable databases larger than 100MB
https://github.com/simonw/datasette/blob/799c5d53570d773203527f19530cf772dc2eeb24/datasette/views/index.py#L15

but this check is not performed for database page. 
I've manually crippled `Database::table_counts` method
```py
async def table_counts(self, limit=10):
    if not self.is_mutable and self.cached_table_counts is not None:
        return self.cached_table_counts
    # Try to get counts for each table, $limit timeout for each count
    counts = {}
    for table in await self.table_names():
        try:
            # table_count = (
            #     await self.execute(
            #         ""select count(*) from [{}]"".format(table),
            #         custom_time_limit=limit,
            #     )
            # ).rows[0][0]
            counts[table] = 10 # table_count
        # In some cases I saw ""SQL Logic Error"" here in addition to
        # QueryInterrupted - so we catch that too:
        except (QueryInterrupted, sqlite3.OperationalError, sqlite3.DatabaseError):
            counts[table] = None
    if not self.is_mutable:
        self.cached_table_counts = counts
    return counts
```

now the page loads in <100ms.

Is it possible to apply size check on database page too?

<details>
<summary>
/-/versions output
</summary>
<pre>
{
    ""python"": {
        ""version"": ""3.8.0"",
        ""full"": ""3.8.0 (default, Oct 28 2019, 16:14:01) \n[GCC 8.3.0]""
    },
    ""datasette"": {
        ""version"": ""0.44""
    },
    ""asgi"": ""3.0"",
    ""uvicorn"": ""0.11.5"",
    ""sqlite"": {
        ""version"": ""3.22.0"",
        ""fts_versions"": [
            ""FTS5"",
            ""FTS4"",
            ""FTS3""
        ],
        ""extensions"": {
            ""json1"": null
        },
        ""compile_options"": [
            ""COMPILER=gcc-7.4.0"",
            ""ENABLE_COLUMN_METADATA"",
            ""ENABLE_DBSTAT_VTAB"",
            ""ENABLE_FTS3"",
            ""ENABLE_FTS3_PARENTHESIS"",
            ""ENABLE_FTS3_TOKENIZER"",
            ""ENABLE_FTS4"",
            ""ENABLE_FTS5"",
            ""ENABLE_JSON1"",
            ""ENABLE_LOAD_EXTENSION"",
            ""ENABLE_PREUPDATE_HOOK"",
            ""ENABLE_RTREE"",
            ""ENABLE_SESSION"",
            ""ENABLE_STMTVTAB"",
            ""ENABLE_UNLOCK_NOTIFY"",
            ""ENABLE_UPDATE_DELETE_LIMIT"",
            ""HAVE_ISNAN"",
            ""LIKE_DOESNT_MATCH_BLOBS"",
            ""MAX_SCHEMA_RETRY=25"",
            ""MAX_VARIABLE_NUMBER=250000"",
            ""OMIT_LOOKASIDE"",
            ""SECURE_DELETE"",
            ""SOUNDEX"",
            ""TEMP_STORE=1"",
            ""THREADSAFE=1""
        ]
    }
}
</pre>
</details>",107914493,issue,,,"{""url"": ""https://api.github.com/repos/simonw/datasette/issues/859/reactions"", ""total_count"": 0, ""+1"": 0, ""-1"": 0, ""laugh"": 0, ""hooray"": 0, ""confused"": 0, ""heart"": 0, ""rocket"": 0, ""eyes"": 0}",,
657572753,MDU6SXNzdWU2NTc1NzI3NTM=,894,?sort=colname~numeric to sort by  by column cast to real,9599,open,0,,,21,2020-07-15T18:47:48Z,2021-08-20T02:07:53Z,,OWNER,,"If a text column actually contains numbers, being able to ""sort by column, treated as numeric"" would be really useful.

Probably depends on column actions enabled by #690",107914493,issue,,,"{""url"": ""https://api.github.com/repos/simonw/datasette/issues/894/reactions"", ""total_count"": 0, ""+1"": 0, ""-1"": 0, ""laugh"": 0, ""hooray"": 0, ""confused"": 0, ""heart"": 0, ""rocket"": 0, ""eyes"": 0}",,