You can think of LinkedRecords as a NoSQL database that you can connect to directly from your single-page application - no backend code required.

• You can use any OpenID Connect provider for authentication, so you don’t need to implement login, password reset, or similar features. Currently, automated tests run against Auth0, but other providers should work as well.
• A flexible authorization model is built into LinkedRecords. No need to write and deploy authorization rules into your backend.
• It supports real-time collaboration to build multi player tools like Notion, Miro, Google docs, …

Concept

You can think of LinkedRecords as a bucket where anyone can sign up and insert data. As long as you don’t share this data with other users or groups, only you can access what you’ve written into it.

In theory, any user could use the LinkedRecords API directly to write and retrieve data. However, this would be inconvenient - just as you wouldn’t expect your users to write SQL queries, you wouldn’t expect them to interact with the LinkedRecords API. A LinkedRecords app is a specialized frontend that hides the API and provides a convenient user interface for accomplishing their tasks.

In the traditional SQL world, inconvenience isn’t the only reason you don’t let users access the database directly - authorization concerns are an even stronger reason. With LinkedRecords, this is no longer an issue: authorization is built directly into the API. This requires a small mindset shift: Instead of defining universal authorization rules in the backend for all records, the user who inserts a data record specifies who can access it.

Think of it as SQL you can call directly from your React app without worrying about permissions; it is easier to read than SQL and provides live updates.