This seems distinctly in opposition to what I believe makes Obsidian a great program, providing an excellent editing environment and extensibility for markdown. The more it ventures into these types of features, the more they're going to lose to applications that designed for this from day dot, like Notion and Anytype.

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kepano 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

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 all SSGs and many apps like Obsidian add autocomplete and other QoL features around it.

Bases to me is exactly what you describe. A feature that provides an excellent editing environment and extensibility for Markdown files.

For example, my blog is a set of Markdown files compiled with Jekyll, that I edit in Obsidian. Now I can add a base in Obsidian that helps me see the state of different blog posts/pages, quickly sort/filter them, and edit their metadata. It helps me spend more of my time editing Markdown files, but at a higher level.

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mudkipdev 2 days ago | parent [-]

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?

	▲	kepano 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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 :)
	▲	LordDragonfang 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's the thing. There's nothing really "custom" here. The files themselves are all still standard markdown with yaml frontmatter. The only difference is that there's now a nice, performant interface for getting an overview for all those files - something that you could fairly trivially make with a script, if you really needed to recreate it. And the file specifying what your views were is, itself, plaintext. There's no lock-in here, and the spec is open and well-documented.

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isege 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s a markdown editor, but they can’t modify the markdown standard, so their scope is limited. All they can do is build features around it.

Having a database isn’t mutually exclusive with the core functionality. You can simply not use it.

	▲	input_sh 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		To be very pedantic, "Markdown standard" is basically a blog post written over 20 years ago and never updated. Everything more "advanced" like tables, to-do lists and multi-line code blocks aren't a part of the "standard" as it was written, but were added on top by different implementations (like CommonMark) which are now commonly-mistaken for the original Markdown. My point being that this isn't something unique to Obsidian, pretty much everyone does it slightly differently while still calling it "Markdown".
	▲	slightwinder 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> It’s a markdown editor, but they can’t modify the markdown standard, They have several modifications of Markdown, everyone has. But not everything makes sense to implement in a flavour of Markdown. YAML is for structured data significant better than a freeform-format, especially when you're in the phase of building the foundation of a new feature-family. The complain is valid, Markdown is for documents, free form, free flow, structured data are a very different use case, and while YAML is better for the job, it's still a different language with different smell. But Obsidian is a tool for managing knowledge, always has been; it's not just a plain Markdown-editor. All those features which are going beyond simple flavoured text, have always been part of it's Core-Mission, just not materialized yet.

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bryanhogan 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For me it's the opposite and I highly disagree.

Valuable features such as this make working with markdown files much better. It's overall a huge plus for working with Obsidian. It does not change the content of the markdown files themselves, so there's no lock-in or other potentials long-term problems. It allows me to move further away from Notion, which is a great thing, and I hope to see them be able to fully replace Notion Databases in the future.

	▲	jamiemchale 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Plus the config for the individual bases is plain text, so in theory the queries could be read and run in other software too.

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pbronez 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The “base” name appears to be misleading. I assumed this feature would add a structured data format to Obsidian, but it does not. This is exclusively a query engine for your existing markdown files.

An obsidian base is primarily defined as a code block in an existing markdown file. That code block defines a series of queries (filters, really) that produce a result set of markdown file names.

So… more a way to work with a large collection of markdown files than a relational database.

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vendiddy 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think it is because it just requires that you write frontmatter in YAML which is pretty human readable and common in certain markdown formats.

Your notes are still in markdown.

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JimmaDaRustla 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a plugin. It's not required, it's an optional extension.

That's like saying McDonald's is going to lose customers because they started selling coffee and muffins.

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criddell 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm with you. I think this should be a downloadable plugin, not a standard plugin.

I kind of wish they would slow down development and just polish what is already there. They are on this treadmill where they feel the need to keep adding new features, new maintenance burdens, bloating the product in every dimension.

In a few years somebody fresh will come along with a product that's a lightweight alternative. It sucks, but that seems to be the lifecycle of this kind of thing. For now, I've turned off automatic updates on Obsidian which isn't ideal either. :(

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theappsecguy 3 days ago | parent [-]

It is. You can disable it from core plugins. Obsidian has done more than anyone else for the PKM community without lock in, it’s quite disheartening to see so many complaints.

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criddell 3 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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whatevertrevor 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

What are you concerned about specifically? What bits of Obsidian should they work on polishing instead?

(not trying to be hostile, just curious as another Obsidian user who is excited by this feature because the current meta search functionality is really poor IMO and this is very much needed polish from my perspective)

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theappsecguy 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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?

	▲	criddell 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.