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Comment by jdgoesmarching | Hacker News Reader

Weird that nobody’s mentioned it yet, but the main value proposition of Notion is that is uses mini-relational databases instead of tables. It’s like Airtable baked inside of a note app.

It has a ton of downsides like being slow, not having offline access, and no E2E encryption, but there are few tools that execute well on the approachable database concept. I wish there were more, because the standard approach of doing bizarre spreadsheet hacks to achieve the same functionality is much less intuitive to me.

The reason there’s an entire weird industry around Notion is not surprising to most people here: relational databases are useful. Unfortunately, most database tools are too unapproachable or cumbersome for most. Notion and Airtable wrapped a good UX around creating semi-primitive rdbs and here we are.

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I've put some thought into how cool it would be to have a feature similar to Notion databases within Obsidian; probably not integrated into the markdown document, but similar to their new Canvas feature, separate files next to markdown documents which map to SQLite databases with a standard schema that you can browse right within Obsidian. Feels like something an add-on could exist for, but doesn't; and/or I hope its something the Obsidian team is thinking about now that Canvases are shipped.

I'll second this. I use Obsidian and don't find the Canvas useful at all, but would love a structured way to query data from my vault.

Dataview can get you part of the way there, but it’s not an easy learning curve and requires a lot of consistent metadata management. Also Obsidian somehow has a worse mobile experience than Notion, which is also a no-go for me when I need quick data entry.

I remember Federico Viticci at MacStories doing some crazy stuff with extensions and Siri Shortcuts that could address those problems, which might be worth exploring if it’s important enough to ya. I have no desire to go down that path.

Obsidian is at the moment not really well-equipped for this task, even though some extensions tried to implement it. I think the major problem is that freetext like markdown simply sucks for managing structured data. And even though there is something like dataview, which enable some level of database-like behavior, it's too limited at the moment. But, there is a successor(?) to dataview in work which aims to be more like notion, and Obsidian seems to have some features on their roadmap which might also be helpful in that regard. So may, in a year or two the situation will have improved?

But frankly spoken, I don't think Obsidian is really a good solution for this. IT should be the other way around, based on a structured format like JSON, and enable a freeform-document which can be extended. Notion is doing this, and while their internals kinda suck, it's far easier for them to move their goals and improve their app.

Make.md is trying to solve this, you could take a look, I tried it, but it's still not stable for my use case, but apparently they have people who use it successfully.

Be sure to mention that if you dare venture down the path of learning about this mysterious mini-relational database, emerging with useful knowledge will cost you three quarters of your sanity and the soul of your firstborn.

It’s not quite that bad, but every. Single. Time. that I’ve been intrigued about notion’s advanced features, I’ve slapped myself two hours later and said “get back to work; you could spend your whole life learning about this. Or at least your whole weekend.”

For me it's one of those learn it once and get it over with. They really are powerful and if you spend one weekend on learning, it should be enough to go a long way.

That's exactly how I felt about Salesforce over many years of customizing it to basically be a UI on top of a relational DB with a nice import tool and some workflows built in.

But apparently it's out of vogue now and Notion and others are the "web 2" versions of that with more Javascript.

> Unfortunately, most database tools are too unapproachable or cumbersome for most.

This always used to be Access and Filemaker's appeal, but they've been so widely and thoroughly derided over the years you wouldn't know it.

The best thing about Notion is that it’s not just (EAV) relational databases — it’s that freely mixed with unstructured rich text, including collaboration features like love editing and comments.

Atlassian's Confluence is apparently launching databases as a feature soon. The screenshots I've seen look very similar to Notion.

You would have loved filemaker back in the day.

Filemaker is underrated. Long ago they came out with Bento which was supposed to be Filemaker for personal use. But it didn't last long.

Both Filemaker and Bento both lacked the out-of-the-box document writing feature. It makes Notion very easy to start using. In fairness both Filemaker and Bento were aimed at very different use cases.

Could you expand in more details?

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