Databases over plain notes: how .base works
When I left Notion for plain Markdown, there was exactly one thing I missed: the databases. Not the wiki styling — the board where you drag a card from “To do” to “Done” and it just updates. I assumed that was the price of owning my notes again as plain files. .base is me refusing to pay it.
It’s still just your frontmatter
A .base file isn’t a database in the usual sense — it’s a saved view over a folder or a set of tags: which notes to include, which properties to show, how to group and sort. The actual values sit in each note’s own YAML frontmatter, things like status: in progress or due: 2026-08-01, and Plainva renders them as a table, board, calendar, gallery, timeline, even a graph. Drag a card from “To do” to “Done” and Plainva changes exactly one field in exactly one note — no hidden database file to keep in sync, no export step before you can look at the same notes a different way. The same folder can back several views at once, a board for triage and a table for detail, and relations connect notes across databases too: a task’s project field points at a project note, and the reverse column — that project’s tasks — shows up automatically on the other side. Every .base in your vault also gets a home in the sidebar — a Databases tab that lists them all, grouped by folder — so a view is one click away instead of buried somewhere in the file tree.
If Plainva disappeared tomorrow
This is the part I actually care about. .base follows Obsidian’s own Bases format, and Plainva’s extras sit under a namespaced key that other tools just ignore, so a database you build here opens in Obsidian too. And if Plainva itself vanished — no company, no server, nothing — your data would still be sitting there as Markdown files you can open, read and grep. Databases are usually where lock-in sneaks in. I wanted this to be the one place it doesn’t.
Try it on your own notes and see what a filtered board feels like when the “database” is just your files.
- See it: the databases guide
- Try it: plainva.com
— Marco