Couchbase on Lorbic

Couchbase Index Best Practices and Query Performance Tuning

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 23:00:00 +0530

Most Couchbase performance tickets I have seen end the same way: someone adds more nodes, the dashboard looks a little better for a week, and the same query shows up in the slow log a month later. The node count was never the problem. The index was.

This is a working reference, not an essay. I already wrote the reflective version of what indexing in Couchbase teaches you about systems in general. This post skips the reflection and gets straight to the decisions: which index type to reach for, how to order composite keys, how to tell if a query is actually using what you built, and which four or five mistakes account for most of the slow queries you will ever debug. Couchbase’s own documentation is the primary source for the recommendations below. Every example runs against travel-sample, the sample bucket Couchbase ships with every install, so you can paste these into your own cluster and see the plan yourself.

OLTP vs OLAP - Why You Need Two Databases

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 21:00:00 +0530

At a recent ClickHouse conference in New Delhi, I attended this Saturday. There were many interesting sessions, but one that stood out was a talk on multi-tenant analytics at scale. I was reminded of a fundamental truth in backend engineering: “The database that runs your app cannot be the database that analyzes your app”.

Early in a startup’s life, we shove everything into one database. User profiles, session data, logs, and analytics events all live in the same Postgres, Mongo, or Couchbase instance. It works, until it throttles.

Introducing CouchLens: A Query Analysis Tool for Couchbase

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 20:00:00 +0530

CouchLens is a client-side web application for analyzing Couchbase N1QL query performance. You feed it JSON exports from system:completed_requests, system:indexes, and schema inference results. It parses execution plans, computes metrics, detects inefficiencies, and generates a report showing where your queries are slow.

Everything runs in the browser. No data leaves your machine. The tool is a Progressive Web App, so you can install it and use it offline. The goal is to give database administrators and developers a way to understand query behavior without writing custom scripts or debugging raw JSON.

What Couchbase Taught Me About System Thinking

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 02:20:06 +0530

Couchbase Internals: Indexes, Queries, Consistency, and Performance

Introduction

Over the last few years I’ve lived deep inside backend systems, and for the past year and a half Couchbase has been my daily companion. Working with Go services that depend on Couchbase taught me that the real lessons aren’t in the marketing slides or quick‑start guides. They’re in the internals: how indexes are built, how queries are planned, how consistency flags change the story, and how durability levels quietly decide whether your system survives a failure or not.

Bitmasking In Go

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 02:20:00 +0000

Bitmasking in Go

Bitmasking is one of those computer science tricks that feels like wizardry, until you realize it’s just some clever shifting and binary math. This blog explores the idea, shows how we use it in Go, and why it’s surprisingly useful when working with databases like Couchbase.

What’s Bitmasking?

A bitmask is just an integer where each bit (0 or 1) represents a flag or state. Instead of storing multiple booleans in a slice or map, you cram them into a single int. Fast to compute, fast to store, and great for indexing.