New source type

[Galkin-Stas]

Greetings and thanks

Hello.

First of all, I want to give apologies for my English. This text is the remnants of my school knowledge, which is already quite old, and a work of an on-line translator.

Secondly, I want to thank you for creating and developing Database Folder. I have been looking for a long time for a system that allows me to take into account a variety of technical information interesting to me. Since the nature of this information is such that it is a set of many objects of different types, it is quite natural that tables connected with each other are most suitable tool for their description, storage and viewing.

As a result, I settled on Notion, because the linked tables I met only there (and in MS Access though, but it is outdated in my opinion, as it's unclear how to use it on mobile devices and remotely via the network). However, I've found many shortcomings in Notion that significantly impede my use of it. And I don’t feel I can influence its development in any way. In addition, it disturbs me, like many others too, that my data is stored in an intransparent format and somewhere there not here. And access to it strictly depends on the availability of internet.

However, your project is fresh and evolving. Therefore, I hope that I could be heard.

The problem of file naming

So I've created a base in Notion and filled it with my old paper records. That's a base about screws, bolts, nuts of various kinds etc.; about where I saw them and at what price, and in what quantity I have their stock.

By creating this base, I realized that the principle of Notion – “everything is a page” often bothers me. Any row in the table must also be a page. Fortunately, the Notion page may not have a name. Which is not so for bases in Obsidian: I cannot create a file without a name!

The problem is related to a philosophical question of “what a record in a table is”. Of course, often such a record is associated with a particular object. An object must have a name, and it's reflected by the name of the corresponding .md file. But there do exist “cross-tables”, and they link objects of one type (from one table) with objects of some other type (from another table) and with a certain “cross-characteristic”, which exists only for pairs of objects. And for such rows it's simply impossible to come up with a meaningful name.

I understand that my reasoning seems very abstract, so a trivial example is below.

Example

Consider a tiny database of nuts and shops.

Table “Nuts”. Each row represents a certain type and size of a nut, therefore it has a name.

Name	Size
М6	6
М8	8
М10	10

Table “Stores”. Each store is a completely independent object too:

Name	Address
"Petrovich"	Novoyasenevskaya, 16
"Boltik"	B. Semyonovskaya, 3

But it’s odd to think about a price of some specific nut in some specific store as an independent object. And to think up with a name for such an “object” (nut, shop, price) is odd too. Therefore, the price table should look like this:

What (link to "Hikes")	Where (link to "Shops")	Price
М6	"Petrovich"	1,5
М8	"Petrovich"	2,0
М10	"Petrovich"	2,5
М8	"Boltik"	1,8
М10	"Boltik"	2,3

What I suggest

Reflecting on this issue, I realized that I could not now switch from Notion to Database Folder on Obsidian, just because I miss a type of data source.

Currently all available data sources work in a way such that each row of a table to corresponds to an individual file. If we introduce a data source such that several rows correspond to a single file, then we would be able to implement “cross-tables”.

Why not just use the usual markdown tables for that purpose (| heading1 | Title 2 |)? It's all about functionality. In addition to displaying data database tables make it easy to filter, sort, and in the future aggregate and group data.

The simplest option (but may not be the best?) I can think of is a new “CSV-file” data source. For the example above, it would look like this:

Prices.md

[[M6]],[["Petrovich"]],1.5
[[M8]],[["Petrovich"]],2.0
[[M10]],[["Petrovich"]],2.5
[[M8]],[["Boltik"]],1.8
[[M10]],[["Boltik"]],2.3

That's all about to be able to place many table rows in one md-file.