The Power of Notion Databases

Josh Redd

September 23, 2024
Part 1/7: Discover how Notion databases revolutionize data organization, enabling you to create powerful tools and streamline your digital workflow without coding.

This is part 1 of 7 in the Notion Database series.

Notion is a toolmaking tool. It gives you the ability to craft your very own software while making it feel like you’re just building with legos. No coding involved, super easy! With Notion, everything is a block – the lego concept. Every line of text, header, page, callout, etc – it’s all just a different flavor of the block. And since Notion is a web app and lives online, each block even has its own unique URL.

So then Notion can easily start to feel like you’re building your own personal website, with pages, subpages, titles, information, pictures and all that good stuff. In fact, if you want to publish it for the world to see, you can easily flip a switch and make it a real website! But that’s for another time. Notion is really easy to pick up and start using because it’s so intuitive to us – we’ve been navigating websites our whole lives.

It’s also very much like your computer files. You can create folders of folders of folders with any number of files in any of them. The organized person will figure out a way to structure these folders and name them according to some system that makes sense to them. But here’s the part that stumps me – your file only lives in one spot. Unless you duplicate the file (not a good idea), it can only live in one place on your computer. So then you have to figure out where it goes. Do you put that photo at Arches National Park under Photos >2023 or is it under Projects > Arches Recap Video 2023 > Photos? You get the point. It’s not the say that you can’t figure it out but just to point out the limitation of this hierarchical model of data storage. This hierarchical storage structure will be blown away by databases.

Pages in Notion, very much like files on your computer – are containers of information. A word document contains text and photos, a Premiere Pro Project contains all of the information for the program to edit a video and save its progress, and so on. I’ll call this the “content” of the page. A Notion page can have a variety of content within it. There’s a slight difference between Notion and your computer though, and it’s that a Notion page can act as both a file and a folder. That’s because you can create a page within a page – a “sub-page”. And you can do this without limit creating as many sub-sub-sub-pages as you’d like. In each of those pages, you can have content on the page as well as many different sub pages.

This begins to highlight the problem – as data grows, you must use some sort of organizational framework to make it somewhat easier to find what you’re looking for. But as it grows, the hierarchical structure becomes more and more complex and the data you are looking for gets buried deeper and deeper down the branches. For an individual user, this may be sustainable, especially as the structure usually reflects their perception of their world and data. But at scale, as a collaborative tool, the data is exponentially multiplied and the perspectives for how it should be organized are many. It’s like a company’s shared dropbox folder. If you know, you know.

There is the hierarchical structure which makes sense of the world and business as we know it, and then there is the data, the knowledge we capture that can support any number or area of that world. With the hierarchical system, the one we’re used to on computers, they are inseparable. We must break that tie. What we really need is a matrix between Structure and Data. We need Data to be able to show up anywhere it needs to in the Structure without having to be duplicated.

Welcome your new data overlord, the database.

Databases solve this problem. They’re not a new concept either, basically every software and website uses them, you just don’t interact with them directly – or you just don’t notice them. It’s part of what’s called the “back-end” of software and we as users are usually only familiar with the “front-end”, the User Interface (UI). But it’s not hard to see the databases at play, and you’ll be able to recognize them easily and everywhere after this.

See, we have the data – the pages and their contents. And we have an organizational structure – the framework for making sense of the world. We just need something layered on top of the data to tell it where in that organizational structure it should show up, especially if it should show up in many places at once. Literally, we need data ABOUT the data. This is called metadata. Meta means “about itself” or “self-referencing”. Therefore metadata is data about itself. Take a photo for example. It’s stored in some file type, maybe .jpg. That’s the data, the picture itself. It’s 0’s and 1’s arranged in such a manner and when it’s deciphered as a jpg, you get the image. But your computer (or phone) will also tell you when it was taken, where it was taken, even the camera settings it was taken with. All of that is metadata. Your word document has metadata on when it was written, when it was last edited, how many words it contains, and more.

So then, lets take that photo and put it in the context of a photo album – even 20 photo albums you’ve saved over the last few years. Now you have 10,000 photos – not unlikely. You could be looking for that one photo and have to remember the album then search through a few hundred photos to find it, taking at least a few minutes. OR, because you know that you’re looking for a photo of The Delicate Arch Monument in Arches National Park, you could just look at the map of all of your photos (supported by all modern software now including iOS) and zoom into the location of The Delicate Arch, taking maybe 10 seconds. This is possible because the software is making sense of the metadata, the location it was taken. It coupled the location of the photo with a map of the world so that you could find it much faster. But the photo doesn’t just live on the map, it lives in a database and can show up in a variety of other ways depending on how you want to view your photos.

We arrive at the Notion database. The Notion database is that extra layer on top of your pages to add a little color to them. In common terms, your pages are inside the database which unlocks this extra layer on top. You not only have the content of each page but now also the context. Let’s say you have a growing list of files across a bunch of different areas or teams (or both). Instead of storing them in so many different places, you store them in one “Files” database. Then, you can add the metadata to each file so that it will show up in the right places. This is done with database “properties” and “linked views” – both of which will be covered a little later in this series. But if you can understand this first principle of data first, you’ll know exactly why you’re using databases and even how to think more systematically with them.

Databases are what took Notion from v1.0 to v2.0 and for good reason. They’re immensely powerful as a toolmaking tool. But their introduction has led to some frustration and misuse. Alas, the tightrope Notion must walk. Make toolmaking ubiquitous with more and more powerful features, while still feeling as basic as note-taking. The biggest frustration will also be covered in this series, and that’s when people have multiple databases for the same thing. Five “Files” databases for your five company teams and any number of individually created databases. Now that you understand the first principle, you see how this defeats the very purpose of the database. You can’t create the data matrix with multiple databases. We’ll get into that with what we call “Global” databases (also called “Master” databases).

Congratulations! You now know what databases are and why they’re a sharp tool in your toolbox! Use them well and they will serve you well. While this may seem a bit nerdy and technical, we’re learning the foundation for organizing our entire life’s digital work so that we can work better. That’s a big deal! Think better about this and you’ll think better about everything it supports.

Read Part 2: Properties of a Notion Database