Obsidian: Meaningless Names, No Directories, Now What?

Freeing Your Thinking, Part 2

This is the second part of an article on an information first approach to Obsidian. The original can be read here, and the first part here.

Analyzing and Synthesizing Information

Let me state my goal plainly: I want to be able to find all of my relevant information on a given topic and synthesize my understanding of that topic in a document or drawing, maybe for personal use, maybe for sharing or publishing.

For this purpose, a primary tool I use is Graph View. Yes, Graph View. And, in the process, I rehabilitate file names as a Valuable Thing.

To explain why Graph View is the best tool for this type of work, I need to re-visit the idea of Obsidian as a database.

SQL and NoSQL Databases

There are two different types of databases. Most common are relational databases, or SQL databases. These are table-based (think spreadsheets) and depend on pre-defining relationships and hierarchies between tables. But Obsidian is clearly not an SQL database, since it has no underlying table structure. It is, in fact, a NoSQL database, aka non-relational database.