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Comment by 015a | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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