Obsidian is a NoSQL Database

Freeing Your Thinking, Part 3

This is sort of an appendix to my two earlier articles on Freeing Your Thinking. Here I provide an explanation of what is meant by NoSQL Database and how it applies to Obsidian.

SQL and NoSQL

In this brief discussion, I will use the words data and information interchangeably. Data is the natural word to use in this discussion because I’m talking about databases. In the context of Obsidian, the data is the contents of all notes, in other words, the information.

There are two different types of databases, relational and non-relational. Relational databases are the kind most people usually think about. Data is kept in tables, with columns for fields and rows for values. The tables have special columns which relate (link) them to other tables. A well-formed table in a spreadsheet is a database. If two are linked by a common column, that is a relational database.

Obsidian is obviously not a relational database.

SQL stands for Structured Query Language, and it is the syntax which was designed to work with relational databases. The association of the syntax and data structure is so strong that relational databases came to be referred to as SQL databases, even though SQL, the language, can be used with any type of…