Has anyone tried out using a personal database like this?
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.
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
edit: couple of fixes
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.
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.
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.