# GROUP BY and Object References

**URL:** <https://community.silverbullet.md/t/group-by-and-object-references/1584>\
**Category:** Ideas\
**Created:** [January 3, 2025, 8:17pm UTC](https://community.silverbullet.md/t/group-by-and-object-references/1584 "2025-01-03T20:17:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![BenjaminTseng](https://community.silverbullet.md/user_avatar/community.silverbullet.md/benjamintseng/32/855_2.png) [@BenjaminTseng](https://community.silverbullet.md/u/BenjaminTseng)\
**Post date:** [January 3, 2025, 8:17pm UTC](https://community.silverbullet.md/t/group-by-and-object-references/1584/1 "2025-01-03T20:17:59Z")

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I’ve been using SB for about 2.5 weeks and have been loving it. The ability to throw in dynamic queries, customize templates / widgets, and write `space-script`’s to extend functionality is **amazing**. Thank you, Zef!

The main areas I would love to see more functionality on (and where I’ve been hacking it together so far) is in exposing **more of the relational model to the user**.

To illustrate one example: I’ve hacked together a light-weight personal CRM/PRM in Silverbullet using `Meeting` and `Contact` and `Organization` objects and have been using frontmatter attributes and queries to link in between:

- on each `Meeting` object, I have a `contact` attribute with a value of `Contact/[NAME]` which links to the corresponding `Contact` object for the person I had the meeting with
- my `Meeting` template has a `suggestedName: "Meeting/[INSERT NAME]-{{today}}"` and I prepopulate the `contact` attribute with a `replace` call and a quick regex to isolate the name from `@page.name`
- on my `Contact` template, I have a query block that shows every meeting I’ve had with the individual by querying all `meeting` objects against `contact = @page.name`
- I’ve had to hack together things an updated `Contact.last_connected` attribute which I’ve done by adding a custom command in my `Meeting` template which uses `editor.setText` to quickly create a template block in to runs a custom function `changeAttribute(@page.contact, 'last_connected', @page.date)` and then removes it (so that I can access the `Meeting`’s attributes)

In a traditional relational database, a lot of this would be handled with foreign key references and aggregation functions on GROUP BY queries or table JOINs (as I currently don’t have a great way of handling multi-contact meetings or things like counting the number of contacts at a particular organization).

I know the intent of SB is not to be a full-fledged database app (although that’s why I heavily considered Siyuan and AnyType while I was thinking about what to use) but I think **exposing more relational functionality** could be quite powerful and just wanted to plant that seed.