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.

Indexing on Lorbic

Couchbase Index Best Practices and Query Performance Tuning