Obsidian Bases first impressions
Maybe you've already heard the news if you're an Obsidian user, but all the rage in the last day or so has been the public launch of Obsidian Bases. People have been testing the beta version for a few months now and it's become quite popular.
I don't have a use-case for Bases in my personal vault (where I store my daily notes, etc.) but I do have use-cases for my personal media library and MLB The Show 24 Franchise Tracker. I set up some initial Bases (a new file type with a .base extension) to play around.
Initially the results are fantastic. It's quite easy to set up a new base, even on mobile. Tap a few filter options and you can get the information you're looking for as a table (or card view) very quickly. A lot of the same options you might look for in Dataview are available here as well.
The bases I tried
I set up two test databases, one in the Library and one in the Franchise Tracker. I kept both relatively simple, and weren't replacing anything groundbreaking. For all of these examples I had to modify the YAML properties to change or add some information in order to get the displayed tables to work properly.
The first was a list of books I rated 5 stars. The set up is simple - list books from the folder /Bookshelf/Books, then filter to those rated 5 stars. I went a little further and set these as a card view (instead of table) and set the cover image to the cover property which contains the URL to the cover. It looks great!
The second base was for my franchise tracker, and simply a list of games played with the result & score. For this I had to add a property that included the score, because a base can only read properties - not the note contents. What I got was a neat little table with the game number and result next to it.
The only drawback is that I currently use the Digital Garden plugin to publish the sites to the URLs above. Currently, with my Dataview queries, the results are converted to text as displayed. I thought this might be the same with bases, but instead I either get ![[5 star books.base]] or the base inline query; in other words DG doesn't support Bases yet.
It only just became publicly available though, and there are APIs, so I'm sure DG will support bases sometime soon. Once that happens I will happily convert some of my Dataview queries to Bases. I'm going to have to do some heavy lifting to change up my properties in many notes, especially in the library, so I'm going to hold off adding any new media until then.
Overall I think Bases are a great addition, but you need to make your own evaluation as to whether it's something that will be useful for you or not; if you don't currently use Dataview I would bet you won't need Bases.