Markdown Database Pattern

jayknight

I've recently switched to SilverBullet[1] as my day-to-day note taking and task tracking app, because of it's very powerful ability to embed little queries and scripts directly in a page to build lists/tables/links that based on data from other pages. This looks like an interesting way to leverage markdown libraries in different ways. Nice! [1] https://silverbullet.md/

cxr

Since this presupposes Markdown of the flavor that comes with YAML frontmatter, and that frontmatter is doing all of the heavy lifting, this is more like a YAML database than a "Markdown database". In any case, nowhere is it indicated why this approach (no matter what you call it) should be preferred over e.g. recfiles.

quixoticaxolotl

Astro does this by design as part of its content collections: https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/content-collections/

tolerance

Notenik does has something like this: https://notenik.app/kb/app-overview.html

dannyobrien

A somewhat similar pattern has been suggested with the Open Knowledge Format: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog/blo...

jarofgreen

I've been doing something similar for years with https://www.datatig.com/ Specifically, my observation was lots of people use a collection of markdown files (or other data formats) in a git repository to crowdsource data. This ties in really nicely with a lot of static site generators. I was interested in seeing if a tool could help data reuse and help people who aren't comfortable with git contribute.

datadrivenangel

"Your filesystem is already a database" Your filesystem is very much not a database, and you risk data corruption and loss by using markdown files as a database, especially if you have multiple programs reading and writing to and from the same files. Things will start getting weird and you will start rebuilding an ACID compliant database engine in your application layer. That said, I love markdown. It's great. Simple.

lsb

As we have more powerful AI plus agents that can run on your phone, keeping everything as a pile of markdown plus some compute on top makes a lot of sense

adsharma

For what benefit though? Much better off storing this in an embedded graph database and use cypher. MVCC, Indexes, Strong typing, WAL, changefeeds. The simplicity of markdown and JSON are deceptive. SQLite is a solid choice, but then you deal with graph-relational impedance mismatch.