I’d like to look into the features of notion more, but I can’t help but wonder why it isn’t more common to see people using a local SQLite database, or any other self hosted database, to serve as a personal knowledge base management system. A lot of the paid solutions I’ve seen seem to bend over backwards to offer a limited subset of the features that are trivially available in an actual database.
Has anyone tried out using a personal database like this?
This reminds me of SQLite's own Fossil-SCM product [0]. It's a source control manager with wiki and built-in web interface all stored within one SQLite file. They use it to manage the source of SQLite itself.
I played with it briefly a few years ago, and just tried it again now. It's definitely not geared towards note taking the way other apps in this thread are, but it could have value as a self-contained and portable wiki/kb. I'd be interested to hear of people's experience with this, either for its main purpose or even just as a note taking system.
Yes, but there are no good tool to do it.
In my case i need to store a a lot of structured data and files. So i need a Document manager / Database. It's hard...
I started with excel a lot of year ago, migrated to access and now i'm trying nixoxdb for android (the only other acceptable alternative was mobidb).
The main problem is the ease to use, you need to create a table for everything you want to store, and nothing support an hybrid free-form AND structured data(while also been able to store files), so the solutions with good text editing are terrible at structured data and viceversa.
Other problem are the ability to sync or even open the database in more than a couple of platform and the ability to access the file embedded in the database from other application (there are others but this are the one that bother me the most).
I'm also evaluating notion, but i really don't want a cloud service since i store basically everything inside my main database and the ability to access years from now is a MUST.
Also i still not have a good solution for my email that are stored mostly in thunderbird and only some message are "exported" to my main database.
I'm thinking of building something myself based on sqlite, .net, dokan/fuse and something similar to syncthing. But it's a big project and i don't have a lot of time
I did. I created a simple html form to input/edit/enter queries, and I had an html index holding common database queries. It worked extremely well as far as that goes, and it only took 90 minutes or so to get it working, so really a trivial setup cost.
There were two things I didn't like about it. I realized that browsability is really important - an SQL database works well if you know what to query, but it's just easier to have an old Yahoo-style index. I went with a wiki approach instead. The other thing is that it's easy to use version control with a pile of text files, but not so much with a database.
These days I do have some things in a "database" but that is a big text file that I query using Linux tools like grep and sed. Does everything I need and plays well with version control.
During my first weeks of Notion usage, I was repeatedly baffled that I never thought more about personal usage of relational databases, as they make so much sense for organizing notes, and many other things.
Having Notion, and also other alternatives, this does not seem viable anymore to me. For example, when I want to edit the "Post" column of my bookmarks database, where I relate blog posts to bookmarks, I just start to type and Notion will suggest matching posts. I can not think of any SQLite frontend that offers such usability features, which is not surprising, as they are clearly not built for using them as personal knowledge base GUIs.
Twinkle Notes (currently in beta) is close to what you just described. It has a local encrypted sqlite3 database. You need a host (paid) to sync across devices, otherwise it's free to use on any device: https://twinkle.app
Please reach to us at support@twinkle.app if you need a free token to try syncing.
It might be an unpopular opinion, but I use Notion and think that it's user interface is quite bad. I doubt they will go in the right direction for what I need. I moved to Notion from Evernote (spammy, terrible, no innovation for years) hoping for a better experience, but I am still unsatisfied. I will soon be looking for another solution.
I have a postgres instance running somewhere that has a history of stuff that I've recorded.
The reason why one might choose not to do this is that a) it takes a bit of work to get syncing across devices, and b) it takes a bit of work to get markdown, images, search, videos etc working.
Devonthink[1] seems like a good personal database, but it's Apple only. I'm in a situation where I'm trying to coordinate a few academic projects with people from multiple institutions and I have yet to find a tool that supports our need. If Basecamp had better integration with Google Docs and Google Sheets, it might work. However, the need to have multiple people review and comment on MS/Google Docs leaves the team with project artifacts scattered all over everywhere. I'll have to take a look at Notion.
Has anyone tried out using a personal database like this?