The vault that reads the warehouse

The challenge

An analytics team wrote their memos in Obsidian but pasted numbers in by hand from a BI tool. By the time a memo was read, the figures were stale, and nobody trusted them.

What we built

An Obsidian plugin that runs read-only, scoped queries against the team’s warehouse and renders the results inline in a note. A memo can reference a metric by name and always show the current number, refreshed on open. It ships as a private plugin to the team only.

The metric names are the important part. Analysts do not write SQL inside a memo; they write {{ arr_net_new }} and the plugin resolves it against a small registry of approved queries that the team owns. Adding a metric is a pull request against that registry, reviewed like any other change, so a number cannot quietly change meaning between two documents.

Keeping it safe

A note-taking app is not a place to put warehouse credentials. Access runs through a service account with read-only rights and a query allowlist, so the plugin can never issue arbitrary SQL, and each analyst authenticates as themselves against an internal gateway that holds the connection. A leaked vault leaks notes, not the warehouse.

Every query is also capped and cached. A memo with forty metric references makes one batched request on open, not forty, and results older than the cache window refresh in the background rather than blocking the note from rendering.

What we got wrong first

The first version refreshed every metric on every keystroke, which was fast enough locally and unusable over a VPN. We moved to refresh-on-open with an explicit manual refresh command, and the complaints stopped. It is a good reminder that the demo machine is never the slow one.

The outcome

Writing and data stopped living apart. Memos referenced live metrics instead of stale screenshots, and the team stopped second-guessing whether a number was current. A year on, the registry has grown past sixty metrics and is maintained by the analysts rather than by us, which is the outcome we actually wanted.