I can’t imagine this flow working with any DB without an UI to manage it.
How are you going to store all that in an easy yet flexible way to handle all with SQL?

A table for notes?
What fields would it have? Probably just a text field.
Creating it is simple: insert “initial note”… How are you going to update it? A simple update to the ID won’t work since you’ll be replacing all the content, you’d need to query the note, copy it to a text editor and then copy it back to a query (don’t forget to escape it).
Then probably you want to know which is your oldest note, so you need to include created_at and updated_at fields.
Maybe a title per note is a nice addition, so a new field to add title.

What about the todo lists? Will they be stored in the same notes table?
If so, then the same problem, how are you going to update them? Include new items, mark items as done, remove them, reorder them.
Maybe a dedicated table, well, two tables, list metadata and list items.
In metadata almost the same fields as notes, but description instead of text. The list items will have status and text.

Maybe you can reuse the todo tables for your book list and links/articles to read.

so that I can script its commands to create simpler abstractions, rather than writing out the full queries every time.

This already exists, several note taking apps which wrap around either the filesystem or a DB so you only have to worry about writing your ideas into them.
I’d suggest to not reinvent the wheel unless nothing satisfies you.

What are the pros of using a DB directly for your use case?
What are the cons of using a note taking app which will provide a text editor?

If you really really want to use a DB maybe look into https://github.com/zadam/trilium
It uses sqlite to store the notes, so maybe you can check the code and get an idea if it’s complicated or not for you to manually replicate all of that.
If not, I’d also recommend obsidian, it stores the notes in md files, so you can open them with any software you want and they’ll have a standard syntax.

SQLite seems ideal but if notetaking is your usecase there are apps for that.

I think you would be better off using something like org-roam. It’s all text so script can still be used and it can be searched fast with ripgrep. Also org mode has loads of features that a homegrown system will never be able to catch up with

Joplin is a note taking app that stores its data in an sqlite database (easy to query but not a good idea to write to it) but there is also a command line version and both versions support access via a data API.

You can always log into a database and use raw SQL. For automation of your tasks you can put in some functions and stored procedures and later on you can always do something more graphical or even more SQL. You can do something like “exec create_note(‘Name of note’)” and “exec notes()” and whatnot.

Then if you want to do something more elaborate than viewing tables and do some formatting programming languages are pretty nice do make stringified versions of the notes and a nice way to browse them.

Then to finish up using some nice bash packages to create a CLI interface is very fun. I like charmbracelet’s stuff because it just looks nice and is easy to use. Here’s a thing you can use to create something to select a note to view: https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum

Hey!

I’ve wanted something very similar—specifically, a plain-text database. I recently came across GNU recutils, which I haven’t had time to play around with yet, but which seems like it fits the bill (at least for me). There’s a couple YouTube videos on it—I encourage you to check it out!

Joplin can do all that and has: Plugin support for nearly anything you want Runs on sqlite if you want to access the data direct Is 100% open source.

Is their any DB that doesn’t have a CLI?

Duckdb has pretty good cli support https://duckdb.org/docs/api/cli/overview.html#non-interactive-usage

Definitely sounds like sqlite.

Is there a reason you’re not looking at tools explicitly built for this like orgmode, obsidian, task-warrior, etc? There’s a plethora of these tools and my experience with this is you really don’t want to over-engineer your productivity suite.

That said, if you go the SQL route, sqlite is the way to go. Other SQL databases must be run as a daemon whereas sqlite operates on a local file directly.

However any SQL database isnt going to have the CLI youre asking for. Its interface is… SQL, so you’re scripts are going to have a bunch of SQL code embedded that isnt easily reusable. A non-sql database will probably be better. I’m not familiar with them but I think there’s some that store their data as text files in a folder which is organized a certain way. But that starts looking like the tools I mentioned before.

@matcha_addict Anything beyond SQLite is too heavy, but if it were me I would use a lightweight wiki like dokuwiki. Having to run SQL to do all these sorts of things sounds like it would just get in the way of both getting and consuming your thoughts.

Are you an emacs user?

Try org-roam. It’s a similar system to obsidian, but fully open source. You have all the note taking techniques of org-mode, and all the scripting power of emacs.

What if instead you used something that’s meant to be used to take notes but that also has querying capabilities?

I have been using Silverbullet for a while and I absolutely love it. It uses Markdown files in disk so it’s very easy to backup, have secondary instances running and even just edit files directly with any other program. But also provides some extra syntax to define objects and query them, so you can for example build a library of recipes and have a page that lists all of the ones that have a specific tag or take less than X time to cook or whatever.

Counter-proposal: Perhaps use Obsidian instead?