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Obsidian Bases

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Re: Obsidian Bases

#241

Post by candu »

I see a lot of complaints about scope creep and vision drift here, so I'll add a different perspective: I use Notion right now, but have been considering a switch to Obsidian for a while now (variety of reasons, chief among them a desire to reduce my own dependence on US-based tech platforms and tools).

The lack of something like Notion databases / tables was the last thing stopping me from migrating over; I found this feature really helpful for organizing my thoughts and tasks as I want them organized, and not having it would have been a noticeable UX regression for me.

With this launch, I'll take a deeper look. It's that simple: it provides a feature many want, largely because it's seen as a killer feature of comparable closed platforms.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#242

Post by deafpolygon »

I tried Bases out but it's not suited for my uses. One issue I have with Bases, for any useful piece of information to be tracked underneath one subject -- you have to shard the data into tiny files which can then be used in the table.

Say you're setting up a media log of your engagements and you want to track completed season for a show-- if you're doing a handful of shows, this isn't a big deal. Over 100 shows, averaging 4 seasons -- that's 400 "completions", one file each. Plus another 100 files for the media metadata itself. That's 500 files that can be simply represented by 500 lines of a spreadsheet, even if you're duplicating title, year, etc. over and over.

The sharding of data into tiny files is what makes it difficult to use anywhere outside of Obsidian. If Obsidian Bases used the full power of YAML front-matter data properly, that'd be SO much better.

It's still faster, more efficient to use a spreadsheet. For anything more than what a spreadsheet can handle-- I would use SQLite.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#243

Post by deafpolygon »

TechPlasma wrote: post #212
er4hn wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many files do you have? At what scale did you see this being a problem? I'm a fan of Obsidian, not affiliated with them, but my experience with basic file syncing like syncthing or git is that you should be able to easily get up into the ten's of thousands of files without an issue.

I don't want to manage that many files. I'll fully admit that I'll hit my limits before the computer cares.

Same here, but the problem is bigger than that. Having to manage a ton of tiny files makes it easier to lose tiny bits of data. What happens if a file changes, gets overwritten and you don't notice? It's much easier to 'version' a single larger file than many hundreds (thousands?) of tiny files containing 4-5 lines at most.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#244

Post by deafpolygon »

matwood wrote: post #128
cloud_watching wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obsidian is amazing because it is a notepad with pretty colors and the graph that gets everyone's attention. The graph is often the most overhyped and underused thing there. It looks complicated and that's the selling point of all that ecosystem around productivity systems and all that. The appearance of deep complexity and work. I love how many just ended up here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864134

I know it’s not the best place to end up, but I always end up back on Apple Notes. It’s has enough features, syncs across my devices, and is simple to use.

Same here... after years, I keep coming back to Apple Notes.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#245

Post by deafpolygon »

nxobject wrote: post #48

I hope more programs use ".base" files for database views – it runs a lot of workflows in Notion that would benefit from a diversity of implementations.

That isn't going to happen. Just like there isn't going to be a bunch of people using .canvas files for canvas views.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#247

Post by simgt »

Ezhik wrote: post #72
Eji1700 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the one thing that really kills me is "consolidating" data is harder than it probably should be. A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch". Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy…

Hyperlinks are all you need: https://ezhik.jp/hypertext-maximalism/

I like that simple rule, I'll give it a go. Thanks for this shameless plug ;)

Re: Obsidian Bases

#248

Post by criddell »

theappsecguy wrote: post #232
criddell wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm disheartened too because they have done so much and I'm happy to pay my annual fee, but it seems obvious that they are headed in a direction that isn't for me.

I think the core note taking is pretty solid, what do you think they should be doing instead? I do think search can be improved, as well as keyboard centric flows and native pdf annotations. But aside from polishing, is there much missing from the app core features?

I think the app might be complete and that's not a bad thing. Obsidian doesn't need to become Notion.

They probably have lots of ideas for new products. They could start working on a follow up product or service.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#249

Post by kepano »

mudkipdev wrote: post #234
kepano wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can think of Bases as an editor and visualization layer for the YAML frontmatter in your Markdown files. Frontmatter is not part of the original Markdown spec, but it became a standard way to add metadata to Markdown files long before Obsidian came along. I believe it started in 2008 with the introduction of Jekyll: https://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-ha... Frontmatter is supported by almost…

You've basically just added a custom language on top of Markdown, what is your plan for importing this into another editor in the future? How will it know to interpret it as a database?

By that rationale isn't Obsidian itself a language on top of Markdown?

Being able to view your Markdown files as a graph or show a list of backlinks is possible because Obsidian has some JavaScript to do that. Previously one could write other views with plugins, but bases make it easier for non-technical folks to create views.

The views are described in human-readable YAML, so recreating them in another tool is possible. That's effectively what many people are doing if they're converting views from Dataview to Bases. There are already tools that automate this: https://github.com/Quorafind/Bases-Toolbox

The output of views can also be converted to plain Markdown tables or CSV.

If you boil it down, bases are a visualization layer that is in service of creating and editing Markdown files — and that's what Obsidian has been since the start.

If you're not interested in this feature set you can disable Bases in core plugins :)

Re: Obsidian Bases

#250

Post by gavmor »

obsidianbases1 wrote: post #91
gavmor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no decent RAG functionality, AFAICT, but the Text-Generator plugin has been fantastic w/ larger contexts and a template that pulls either/both links and backlinks into the inference query window. Hands-down my most productive interface to LLMs for [years since GPT3.5] years running.

> There's no decent RAG functionality Do you have any examples of what decent RAG functionality might look like? And where the current plugins fall short?

I simply haven't gotten Smart Connections to index my vaults successfully, for whatever reason. So I can't give them a proper review.

I'd hope that any inference performed in a given note would take as context not only the full text of the note, but its nearest neighbors—although, frankly, what I really want are the implicit definitions of proper nouns, ie links.

I also frequently generate articles based on the subject's backlinks, ie mentions in other notes.

Both of those functionalities are provided by Obsidian's core featureset, so all that's missing—and what might provide outsized value—is indexing notes based not only on the embeddings of their literal text, but on meta-text such as: the questions they might answer; the definitions of their principle subjects; counterfactual statements they falsify.

All of which would allow the editor to bring up a relevant note when writing/reviewing another–ie the "unknown knowns".

I think this technique is akin to "knowledge enrichment", or "meta-embeddings," but I think actually those terms have lower-level meanings.

Of course, generating these embeddings would make the indexing process slower and more failure prone, and so I'd be even more likely to fail to get it working and call it a dud.

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