Bases over Frontmatter

The second decision that changed how my Obsidian vault works: putting structured data in frontmatter, then querying it with Obsidian Bases.

Every note gets frontmatter. At minimum, a categories array with wikilinks. For specific note types — books I'm reading, people I've met, work tickets — I add type-specific fields. Ticket notes have status, priority, sprint, epic. Book notes have author, rating, started, finished.

Bases turn those fields into database views. Bases/Work Items.base lists every ticket assigned to me, grouped by sprint, sorted by priority. Bases/People.base is a directory of everyone I've taken notes about, with company and location columns.

The payoff is that the vault stops being a pile of files and starts acting like a set of linked databases — while still being, underneath, a pile of markdown files I can grep through. I didn't pick a table schema. I picked what to write down, and the schema emerged from frontmatter conventions I could change whenever I wanted.