> I wonder if the Notion developers made a serious attempt to build on top of a more conventional structured schema, and found it really was unworkable? This i

> I wonder if the Notion developers made a serious attempt to build on top of a more conventional structured schema, and found it really was unworkable? This is an interesting question. I actually think Notion's data model is much more conventional than the data stores behind document editors like Google Docs or Figma. Blocks are "just" (these quotes are doing a lot of work) rows in Postgres. We use JSON for properties for flexibility and for user-defined property schemas. We could use an entity-attribute-value (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80...) table as you describe for that, but such a table would complicate our caching techniques. It would also be enormous, but, it might be time for another think about that since we finished sharding.