3 ms·

I missed it was in a database when I checked it out. That'd be a hard no for me. I much prefer separate text files for any minimal notes solution, since that p

I missed it was in a database when I checked it out. That'd be a hard no for me. I much prefer separate text files for any minimal notes solution, since that plays well with nvAlt, Obsidian, 1Writer, etc, and is the safest sync in every file syncing service (they pretty much all know how to deal with text conflicts). It also lets me write side tooling to crawl and process notes much more easily than if I had to hit a database. At this point, a proprietary database had better be justified by something epic like Roam's bullet transclusion or Evernote's back-end handwriting OCR, or some other killer feature that's hard to replicate locally in decoupled files. Otherwise, it's just not worth even considering.

The_Colonel 6y ago
> At this point, a proprietary database had better be justified by something epic like Roam's bullet transclusion or Evernote's back-end handwriting OCR, or some other killer feature that's hard to replicate locally in decoupled files. Otherwise, it's just not worth even considering. Even basic things like backlinks are not possible (to do well) without some sort of indexes and overall control over data. (assuming we're talking about large amount of data, 100 notes does not constitute "knowledge base" IMHO).
- geoelectric 6y ago
  Obsidian.md is doing them pretty well in plaintext. It has scaling issues, but think they come in a couple orders of magnitude above the "toy" threshold you mention. It might suffer a bit for a well-populated Zettelkasten until they optimize more, but for most users it'd be fine. I think a lot of the scaling issue was in the link graph analysis, and they've been steadily working on that. To your point, I'm sure it caches a fair amount of that analysis in its .obsidian directory, but to mine, it can still calculate them from scratch on a new (or newly synced) note set. It does so invisibly the first time it sees the Vault (or the new file in the Vault directory, if you add it from elsewhere), so it's still portable, just with an indexing phase if you want to show a backlink or graph pane. The important thing for me is that most other plaintext notes editors support the forward [[links]] that are the only real "source" data. The implied backlink analysis is just that, results of an analysis. It'd be nice for the cache to be portable, but not necessary. Transclusion is where I'd agree with you, since that actually appears in the notes themselves rather than as part of an active sidebar. You're more or less stuck with proprietary software that knows how to look for anchors and render their targets inline, at least until/unless we get a generic format for it. But so far that's been more a reason I can't have transclusion yet than a reason why I'd move off plaintext notes in a directory.
juped 6y ago
A ubiquitous public domain library is a proprietary database now?
- clankyclanker 6y ago
  No, but it is non-transparent and can’t be edited with a text editor, without being unpacked and repacked like Fossil. Yet another layer of indirection is the last thing I want when I’m in a hurry to write down a thought before I forget it. Of course that can be overcome with practicing the tooling, but that’s also a non-negligible transition cost.
- geoelectric 6y ago
  Yes, because the database is the custom schema + the data being managed by the library, not the library itself. The library is properly an example of a DBMS: database management system, it's only "a database" informally to lay users.

The_Colonel 6y ago

> At this point, a proprietary database had better be justified by something epic like Roam's bullet transclusion or Evernote's back-end handwriting OCR, or some other killer feature that's hard to replicate locally in decoupled files. Otherwise, it's just not worth even considering. Even basic things like backlinks are not possible (to do well) without some sort of indexes and overall control over data. (assuming we're talking about large amount of data, 100 notes does not constitute "knowledge base" IMHO).

geoelectric 6y ago
Obsidian.md is doing them pretty well in plaintext. It has scaling issues, but think they come in a couple orders of magnitude above the "toy" threshold you mention. It might suffer a bit for a well-populated Zettelkasten until they optimize more, but for most users it'd be fine. I think a lot of the scaling issue was in the link graph analysis, and they've been steadily working on that. To your point, I'm sure it caches a fair amount of that analysis in its .obsidian directory, but to mine, it can still calculate them from scratch on a new (or newly synced) note set. It does so invisibly the first time it sees the Vault (or the new file in the Vault directory, if you add it from elsewhere), so it's still portable, just with an indexing phase if you want to show a backlink or graph pane. The important thing for me is that most other plaintext notes editors support the forward [[links]] that are the only real "source" data. The implied backlink analysis is just that, results of an analysis. It'd be nice for the cache to be portable, but not necessary. Transclusion is where I'd agree with you, since that actually appears in the notes themselves rather than as part of an active sidebar. You're more or less stuck with proprietary software that knows how to look for anchors and render their targets inline, at least until/unless we get a generic format for it. But so far that's been more a reason I can't have transclusion yet than a reason why I'd move off plaintext notes in a directory.

juped 6y ago

A ubiquitous public domain library is a proprietary database now?

clankyclanker 6y ago
No, but it is non-transparent and can’t be edited with a text editor, without being unpacked and repacked like Fossil. Yet another layer of indirection is the last thing I want when I’m in a hurry to write down a thought before I forget it. Of course that can be overcome with practicing the tooling, but that’s also a non-negligible transition cost.
geoelectric 6y ago
Yes, because the database is the custom schema + the data being managed by the library, not the library itself. The library is properly an example of a DBMS: database management system, it's only "a database" informally to lay users.