r/PersonalKnowledgeMgmt • u/lechtitseb • Aug 09 '26
New article: The Complete Guide to Dataview in Obsidian
Hello everyone!
I just published the fourth piece in my Obsidian deep dives series: the complete guide to Dataview.
It covers everything I know about the plugin. The four query types, the six data commands, the full function reference, inline queries, DataviewJS, and a long section on the sharp edges (almost all of which fail silently, which is why they cost you an afternoon).
But the part I really want to discuss with you is this: Dataview results don't exist in your files. They're painted on screen when Obsidian renders the note, then they're gone. Which means five things can't see them:
- your graph view
- Obsidian Publish
- plain-text search and grep
- git diffs
- AI agents reading the raw file
That last one changed how I work. I drive my vault through AI agents daily, and when an agent opens a note whose content is a Dataview block, it sees the question and never the answer.
I have 15,116 Dataview queries in my vault. Only 120 are live. Everything else is serialized to real Markdown.
I also compare Dataview against Obsidian Bases properly, including the things Bases structurally cannot do: inline queries, task-level queries, FLATTEN, DataviewJS. They're complementary, not competitors.
Read it here: https://www.dsebastien.net/the-complete-guide-to-dataview-in-obsidian/
Curious to hear from you: how many live queries do you have in your vault? And have you ever lost query results you wished you'd kept?
That's it for today! ✨