If you take notes in Obsidian, you've probably hit the same wall: search finds text, but it can't answer "show me every snippet I've tagged regex" or "what debugging notes do I still have open?" That's what the Dataview plugin is for — it treats your notes' frontmatter (and inline fields) as rows in a database and lets you query them with a SQL-like syntax, right inside a note.
The setup
Dataview reads YAML frontmatter at the top of each note. Say every snippet note in a snippets/ folder starts like this:
---
language: javascript
tags: [regex, validation]
project: side-project
status: active
---
Once a folder of notes shares consistent keys like that, you can query across all of them from any other note:
TABLE language, tags, project
FROM "snippets"
WHERE status != "archived"
SORT file.mtime DESC
That renders as a live, auto-updating table — no manual index to maintain. Add a note, fill in the frontmatter, and it shows up next time the query re-renders.
Beyond a flat table
A couple of patterns that make this genuinely useful day-to-day rather than a neat demo:
Group by a field — see your snippets clustered by language instead of one long list:
TABLE rows.file.link AS "Snippets"
FROM "snippets"
GROUP BY language
Build a status board — reuse the same status field to get a lightweight status view of open items, no separate task manager required:
TABLE project, tags
FROM "notes"
WHERE status = "open"
SORT file.mtime ASC
The catch
Dataview is only as good as your frontmatter discipline. It's easy to set up one well-tagged folder as a proof of concept, then six months later realize half your notes are missing the status field because you were in a hurry and skipped it. The query silently just... doesn't include them. There's no error, just a table that's quietly incomplete.
The fix isn't a smarter query — it's not having to think about the schema every time you create a note. That's the actual problem I was solving when I built Developer Second Brain, an Obsidian vault with pre-built templates for notes, snippets, and the stuff you always forget: the frontmatter fields are already there when you create a new note from the template, so the Dataview queries above work from day one instead of requiring you to invent and remember your own schema first. It's a one-time $27 download if that's useful to you: https://stackline-studio-web.vercel.app/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=content&utm_campaign=launch
But even without it — if you're already in Obsidian, Dataview plus consistent frontmatter is worth setting up on its own.
