I should take a moment to clarify that I'm not affiliated with Microsoft or any of the links I'm posting here in any way. I make a living building web sites and as mentioned above, many of them leverage SharePoint. I find it a pretty easy way to build intranet solutions for my customers.
Assuming you've got your SharePoint site created within SharePoint Online, creating a "List" is pretty simple. Here's an article from Microsoft explaining how to do so: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-list-0d3.... Think of a list as a database table. From there you can create various types of columns including "look-up" columns, which are basically joining to another table on the same site with a foreign key.
I think from there you could dive into the Power Platform, but there's so much out there, I think this would be a good start.
I've always thought SharePoint was terribly slow, but that was just from experience interacting with the web interface itself. Does the API perform well? Or is there that same inherent latency to put up with?
And do you have any general tips/ideas/learnings to share about using SharePoint in this way? I definitely want to give this a try.
It actually has an editor that looks eerily like the linked one so I wonder if they’re related. It lets you use slash-commands that’s much more expressive than everything except maybe notion. But again, it lets you operate against a database-like set of objects.
I don’t think you can point it at real databases though.
AnyType.io
What I miss (but not enough to change) is the ability to have a plain Markdown page, and not only rely on bullets.
But again, Logseq is by far the closest to my style of taking notes (short, usually one/few lines blocks)
This. So much this. I prefer Logseq's UI over Obsidian's but the lack of support for plain (non-outline) text files made me switch to Obsidian in the end.
It has far more data power than Coda, with tables that can be used as databases, a strong formula language, and loads of other nifty features. Like Notion, it's a closed-source SaaS.
Notion seems to be the only player in the space that effectively uses its tables as linkable databases, most similar products seem to either lack table functionality or they're just simple formatted text.
So much of my daily work revolves around databases and Excel, I would love the ability to have multiple views of database tables embedded in a text editor, varied by context, with full backend control over the database itself. Bonus points if I could easily have scripts run on them in the background, almost like a programmatic kind of Excel.