Notion just changed how databases work

Notion just made a big change to how databases work and it's kind of causing a lot of confusion. Essentially, databases can now have multiple data sources, which is probably a term you've never heard before and which represents a fundamental change to how databases work at their core. So, in this video, I'm going to do my best to quickly explain what this feature is and perhaps more importantly, what this feature isn't because it's really easy to misconstrue this feature as a different and extremely highly requested feature that doesn't exist yet. So, let's first take a look at Notion's tweet they put out, databases just got more powerful. You can now parent multiple data sources in a single database and add linked views, too. And like I said in the intro, this is causing a bit of confusion. Sorry, but isn't this a linked database? Correct me if I'm wrong. Could someone explain, please? What's the point of this? There's a lot of confusion around this. So, I'm going to try my best to uh just give you a quick explanation of what this is. And I want to briefly just go over to a sample notion workspace and try to demonstrate as quickly as possible. So, let's say that you're trying to build a note-taking system. If you want system, you probably are going to have multiple databases or what Notion would now call data sources. You're going to have a repository for your actual notes. And then because you probably want to organize those notes, maybe you'd have a different data source for tags. So you have a tagging system and you could say tag certain notes as gardening notes and other notes as AI notes and things like that. The way we would build this in the past would be to type slash database and we'd make ourselves a database called notes. And then down here we'd make another slash database block and we would call this database tags. Right? So, we've got two different database blocks that represent the two different data sources in our system. What we can do now is instead of doing this, we can actually add multiple data sources in the same database block. So, let me open up this notes database as a full page. And if I click the new view button right here, let me zoom in a couple of ticks just so you can see this even more easily. You'll see this new data source button. Now, I will note this is now rolling out to workspaces fairly slowly. So, you might not see this today, but this is what you will see once your workspace is updated with these new features. So, if we click new data source now, we've got some changes that have just popped up. We're going to see new data source right here. We see this even bigger heading that says notes and new data source, which I'll explain in a second. And then we've got our second view here. So, I'm going to go with new empty data source. We'll call this tags. And now what you can see is that we have a database block called notes and tags which contains multiple data sources. In effect we've done the same thing that we used to would have done here. And that's kind of a weird way of saying that. Uh we had two different databases here. Now we have the same exact structure tucked inside of a single database block. And I can name this database block anything I want. So maybe I'll call this uh note takingaking system data structures or data sources just to make it really descriptive. And if we go into the settings here, there is this new at the bottom here, manage data sources menu item. And if we click into it, we can see that there are two different data sources inside of the single database block. So that is really all this new feature is. It's kind of unexciting on the surface and in my opinion it doesn't really represent a big shift in how you're going to be doing things. It doesn't add a whole lot of new functionality, but it does allow you to build in a different way if you want to. And you can see that there are views associated with these sources. And I'm going to go ahead and name these views because they're not very descriptive right now. Uh right now they're just both called table. But if I go into the settings and I just name this one notes and we can actually see the source for this view is notes. So this will be a bit more descriptive. Maybe even give it a little pencil square icon uh icon there. And then over here we'll do the same thing. We're going to call this one tags to sort of represent that it is connected to our tags source. You can kind of see how within this single database page, we're able to build out connected systems. Hey there, editing Tom here. I figured this would be even more clear if I actually created some sample properties between these two different data sources. So you can see now as I'm switching between these, we see completely different properties in each of these views. And that is because each of these views is connected to a totally different data source. Notes in this case and tags in this case. One additional point that I forgot to point out in the main video, but that is very important is that permissions are set at the database level, not at the data source level. Which means if I come up to the share menu here on this full page database and I change my access from say full access to canedit content that rule is going to apply to all of the data sources inside this database. Now what this feature is not is the ability to bring multiple sources of data like say our notes and tags into a single unified

view. And I want to make that very clear because when people say things like multi-source databases or when notion themselves say you can parent multiple data sources in a single database they aren't meaning that you can create a view which shows rows from multiple data sources. And I know a lot of people want a feature like that. For example, people might want to bring in tasks from a personal private tasks database and then tasks from a different team tasks database into say a single due today view. That would be pretty sweet, but that's not what this feature is. And currently, the only place where you can do that is inside the notion home tab where there's that my tasks widget. It's the only place in notion where they've allowed multiple data sources to come to a single unified view. I've got a video on that covering that whole uh feature if you want to check that out. But I just wanted to make very clear this uh this feature is not that. So that is basically what this system is. Uh I want to cover a few little technical things that you can do and then I'm going to get into a deeper uh bit of a discussion and presentation that I've built for you on how databases are actually structured just in case you're curious because when I started really like digging into these changes and trying to learn them and become a subject matter expert on them, it was pretty confusing and it took me a while. Hopefully I can cut down on that learning time for you. Uh a couple of things before we get into that. If you want to say move a data source, you can actually do that. So, let's just say I called this uh database down here something different. Or to make things even more clear, I'm going to go ahead and delete this one. And I'm just going to create a new database block. And I'll just call this uh empty holding database. So, one thing I'll point out is that in creating this database block, I have created an initial source for it. And if I go to manage data sources, here it is, empty holding database. Now let's say I wanted to go back to that pattern of having a single data source for or a single database for each of the important data sources in my complex system. Let's say I wanted to have notes in this database block and I wanted to have my tags which I've already built down here. I can go uh really to any of these views and I can go to the settings. I can go down to manage data sources and in the little three dot menu in tags I can move this somewhere else. So, let's see if I can actually find empty holding database here in my testing. Sometimes it takes a little bit to come up, but nope, there it is. So, if we move uh our data source to another database, we're going to get this little popup asking if we want to move the view that is associated with it. So, if there are multiple views associated with a data source, it'll allow us to move all of them. And those views are the ones from this particular database block up here. uh or we can move the data source only. In this case, I'm going to go ahead and move the view and the data source. And you will notice that now on our original database block, we only have notes. If we check our data sources, we only have notes. And if we come down to this new one we had created, we've got our tags view right here. We can see that the source of the tags view is the tags data source. And if we look at our manage data sources area, we have that tags data source along with the empty holding data source. And let's say that I don't want empty holding data source because I don't I just created it to get myself a brand new database block to which I could move that tags data source. I'll go ahead and move that one to the trash which will delete the data source and the view associated with it. So that's how I can sort of revert to the old structure and I'm covering that because you might need to do that if you do create a multiple source database. The reason for that is that there is a brand new version of the notion API. And in fact, maybe I'll just go ahead and show that to you quickly. Let's do notion API. Find the notion API site here, developers. notion. com. Uh, and in the guides, they've got this upgrading to 20250. You really don't have to read this if you're not a developer, but I'm just bringing this up because basically any integration you use like Zapier or Make. com or Pipedream or N8N or Fly Lighter or really anything else, um, if those integrations want to work with a database that has two or more sources, they have to upgrade to this new version of the API. And Notion, uh, kind of gave developers a heads up about a week in advance, but this is a significant upgrade. um and developers are probably going to take a while to do it. So if you rely on integrations and you go ahead and start adding multiple data sources to your important databases, you might see that those integrations break until developers get a chance to fully test and upgrade to this new version of the API. And that is why I wanted to make sure to show you how to sort of revert because if you do revert, if you take a data source out of a multi-source uh database block and you move it to a different database block, you will make that database block that now has a single source compatible with the old version of the API. So keep that in mind if any of your integrations break. I

think I have covered all of the really practical stuff here. Um if I didn't, I will point your attention in the description. I have I've written a 4,000word article covering literally everything there is to know about this feature. Tested the absolute be Jesus out of it. Uh so there are all sorts of different FAQs sections here. If you want to figure out the IDs, what's going to happen if you delete stuff, it's all covered in this article. What I want to do now is kind of go into a deeper discussion of how notion databases are actually structured because I think this feature release is probably going to cause a lot of confusion as to what databases are, what data sources are, what are views, what are all these terms that are getting thrown around. So, I've created what is essentially a PowerPoint presentation for you and I'm going to do my best to explain this clearly. I will also note that there is an entire section in the article uh near the top notion databases and data sources explained where I go through this in a written form. So if I'm going too fast for you in this video uh check out the written form because the written form will go as fast as you want it to go. Uh so let's go into PowerPoint presentation school teacher mode. First I want to quickly review how the block structure in notion works. And I'm going to do this start at this point because uh databases are blocks and so are pages. So uh if you've gone through my notion fundamental series, you might have heard me say that almost everything in notion is a block. We alt tab back over to notion and look at say my outline for this video. Here's a little bit of a look into how the sausage is made. This entire page is a block. Uh all of these different little sections where you can see the little icon popping up. Every single one of these is a block. And each of these blocks has a type which can even transform. This is a paragraph block. But if I wanted to make it something else, I could turn it into a page block or a heading block or a to-do list block. There's all kinds of cool stuff you can do with blocks. And blocks build upon each other to sort of create this hierarchical or treelike structure. So if we have a page here, it parents all of these blocks here. If we had like a bolded list item that had some nested list items underneath it, it would be the parent of those nested list items. Okay, all good with me so far? We're going to get a little bit more complicated now because we are going to go and start looking at databases. So, a database is a block itself. And I actually don't think I can zoom in presentation mode. So, we're going to skip that and we're going to zoom in with my little command button. A database is a block. It's the child block of a page that contains it unless it is a top level database in which case the workspace is its parent. Right? Okay. Now, in the past when we had single source databases only, we actually didn't know there was some entity called a data source. We were under the impression that pages in a database were parented by the database itself. Well, it turns out there was actually something sitting between the database block and the pages within it the whole time. something called a data source. Now, a data source, notion tells me, is not actually a block. It's a sort of different kind of entity, but it is the thing that holds the pages, or more technically, it is the direct parent of the pages that it contains, even though it's not a block. And then the database block is the parent of the data source. Now, the database is also the parent of something else that is additionally not a block. That is called a view. And that is what you actually see when you're inside of a database. You actually see and I'll go ahead and give you a lookie at a database view. Here you see a view. So this is not a direct look at the data source. It's a view of that source. It's a unique set of property visibility settings of filters of sorting criteria uh of everything else in here. grouping, conditional color, all this kind of stuff that if you've got a little bit of a database background or coding background, this might sound familiar. Uh, within an app, we would write a query to query an actual backend database and do something very similar. We'd be pulling records from the database and ordering them in a certain way, filtering way. Um, building our UI to show specific columns or properties from that data in a certain way. So, that's what a view does. And if we create multiple views in a database block, we've got multiple views which may be pointing to a single data source. And I can actually show you that in what was supposed to be my next slide over here. So here is what it would actually look like from a sort of schematic point of view. If you were to have a database with two views, let's say a task manager with a due today view, and a done tasks view, you'd have a view over here, but both of them are pointing or displaying content from the data source. Remember, the data source is the parent of all the pages. Okay, so let's move things up one

level of complexity, but uh we're still not stepping into the territory of this brand new update. We're still talking about a notion how it used to be where you could have a single data source inside of a database. Over here we have a model of another database block with a linked view. So in many of my notion tutorials, you've probably seen me create a databases page on sort of like the back end of a build, say a task manager, and that's where I'll put the tasks database and the projects database. And then on say a homepage, totally different page, we create what's called a linked database view. And that essentially creates a view here. That view is the child of another database block and it links to a data source somewhere else. So in the way that notion used to work, this database block was actually something called a linked database block. and all it could do was link was create a view and link that view to a data source contained in a true database block. So what this update has done is essentially erase the distinction between these two entities. It used to be that there was a linked database block and a database block. The difference being that the database block held a data source, whereas the linked database block simply created a view that then pointed to a data source that was contained by a true database block. This update gets rid of that distinction entirely. So, here's our final graph. Look at this graph meme. Insert it yourself. I don't know if I have time to edit it in. Uh, now database blocks are just database blocks. They are a special block type that can contain views and that can contain multiple data sources. Those views might link to a data source that is internal to the database block or they might link to a data source that lives in a different datab database block. And I'll show you a practical example back in notion in a second after I finish explaining this. So hopefully it kind of syncs in a bit better. But I want to actually point out this visual at this point. So we've got our database block over here. We have the data source that we always had with one of our source views pointing to it. And actually we have another source view pointing to it as well. So this again looks pretty much just like it did in uh the way notion used to work. But within this same database block we now have the ability to create a second data source. And as this graph indicates, data sources don't actually have to have a view associated with them at all. Now when you create a data source, it is automatically going to create a single view and tie that view to it. But you can actually delete that view without deleting the data source. I wouldn't recommend it. I think that is a huge recipe for confusion especially in a team workspace. But technically data sources can exist and be nicely tucked inside of a database block without having any views pointing toward them. So that is what this sort of shows. So again, this is in the article if you want to study it. read my written version, if uh me talking really fast is just not syncing in, check that out. But I do want to show you an example of how we can point to external data sources along with uh internal data sources in the same database block. Now, so back here, we're at our note-taking system. You can see that we've got our notes view, and uh the source of that is notes. Let me go ahead and just call this notes view. Uh, and one other quirk is if you only have one view in this database block right now, by default, you don't actually see the view name. You see the source name. Now, if we go into layout, we can hide the source title, and that will bring up the view name. Additionally, if we create a second view, you're always going to see those view names. So, let me go ahead and bring back that data source title there just to be really clear about what we're doing here. So, uh, in this one database block, we can, of course, create a new view. And let's call this view, uh, people. Maybe we're building a CRM into our system. Let's get some people or user 3 icon going there. Uh, and by default, you can see the source is notes. So, the source in this view that we create just wants to link to that same source that our original view linked to. We can actually change that. So, if we want to, we can link to an existing database. it actually doesn't seem to allow us to create a brand new data source here. So, in this view, instead of people, let's actually just call this um inbox. So, this would be an example of creating another view in a database that points to the same source that we're working with. Cool. Okay. So, something else we could do is create a brand new data source. We're going to say new empty data source, and this will be our people data source. So within this exact same database block, we could create our little CRM view that links to our people data source. And we'll add

our little person icon there just to make it uh really obvious. So now, just as a recap, and I'm opening this as a full page here. I did that a little fast, so let me slow it down. We now have a database block with three views and two data sources. We can see all of our views here and we can go to the settings manage data sources and we see we have two data sources. Now what we can also do is create another view and I'm actually going to go back to this page here so you can see this tags database down here. We can create another view. We'll just say uh table. That's fine. And we can link this to an existing database or more technically an existing data source that lives in a different database. So, let's link that to our tags data source. We're just going to go ahead and uh create a new table view there. We'll call it tags. Why not? And we'll hit done. So, now what we have is a fourth view, but a view that is linking to a data source that lives somewhere else. And you can sort of get some differentiation between them. or notion provides that with this little arrow that you can see here and which we did used to have in uh linked database blocks. So now as a final recap we have a single database block. It has four views. If we go back into our settings we can still see that we only have two data sources. So three of those views are linking to these internal data sources. We have our counts right there. Two views of notes. one view of our people data source. And finally, we have one linked view, our tags uh view, which links to our tags data source, which lives somewhere else. So, I think that's where I'm going to call this video. Hopefully, I've explained it as best I can. Again, there is a full article on my website. I'm going to link to it in the description down below if you want to understand this feature. Everything you need to know is in here. Uh, but to wrap this up with a bit of a summary, this is a big change to how databases actually work in Notion. It's a big change to their structure. It may be laying the groundwork for some more things coming in the future. I'm not sure. We'll have to see. Only time will tell. But I don't really recommend jumping in and like changing existing systems to utilize this just yet. For one, there is a high likelihood in team setups that changes like this may confuse other people, especially if there's anyone else in your organization or team who also helps to manage uh your notion workspace or if you have like another notion architect. But perhaps more importantly, realize that when you start working with multi-ource databases, for now at least, you run the risk of integrations breaking because not every integration provider has upgraded to the next version of the API. And even if they do, in certain cases, there may be work you have to do to update as well. For instance, I have pipe dream workflows that I share for free, which allow me to take notes with my voice in notion, to brain dump tasks with my voice into notion. I've got a whole bunch of cool pipe dream workflows. I had to go work to make some changes to those today. Not actually updating them. I actually had to make changes to pin them to the old version of the Notion API. but my users will actually have to go in and accept those updates manually. So, there's going to be this sort of slow lockstep process that we're all going to have to go through to make our integrations compatible with this change. And the slower you are to adopt this change, the less pain you will feel in that lock set process. And to be honest, for individual users, I don't think this adds a tangible productivity benefit. Now, if you really love the idea of building a complex multi-source system in that single unified database UI, then great, you're off for the races. But it really doesn't change anything fundamentally in how your workspace works. I don't think it's going to help you work faster. Um, and it especially is not really worth retroactively upgrading older systems. Now, if you want to start building newer systems, smaller systems with this tool, I think there's less of a risk of things breaking with integrations and less of a risk with confusion. Um, but it just isn't worth upgrading older systems. And on that note, we will not be upgrading our Notion templates to utilize multi-source databases. Not right now. Probably not in the future. There is again not a big tangible productivity benefit to it. it would uh make obsolete a lot of our tutorial videos and screenshots. And honestly, I think it is a little bit easier to conceptualize how databases connect together and it makes it easier for me to teach databases if we adhere to a single data source per database design structure because this allows me to create multiple databases on one page. And then if I say create a

relation property, let's find relation here just to demonstrate this. and I link this to tags and I make it a two-way relation. Look at that. You can actually see the two reciprocal properties uh pop in directly in the same view. If I wasn't building it this way, I would have to constantly jump back and forth between these two views. And while that's fine, I think this is actually a better way of teaching and conceptualizing how these two different data sources interact. So, that is truly everything I have to say in this video. If you are looking for notion templates, we've got a bunch of great ones over at thomasjfrank. com/templates, including Ultimate Brain. If you want a connected system that brings tasks and projects and notes and goaltracking and a whole bunch of other stuff into a single system for managing your life, you can get all that over at thomasjfrank. com/brain. Link in the description down below. It is the system I use to run my life. And I think you're going to have a great time running yours with it as well. If you have questions about this, please let me know in the comments down below. I do my best to answer all of at least the serious comments I get. So, um, let me know what your questions are. Otherwise, check out this video right here, which the algorithm has kindly recommended for