Last time we looked at building manual secondary indexes in Couchbase: in effect, using Couchbase more for its key-value store properties than as a document store.

Continuing that key-value thread takes us to one of the most important questions in non-relational database modeling: how do we name our keys? Answer: we start with a key pattern. Here’s a closer look at how to take advantage of Couchbase with data modeling best practices.

Three ways to build and use keys in Couchbase

There are, broadly, three ways to create a key pattern in a NoSQL key-value store:

  • deterministic: e.g. the email address someone uses to log into your system
  • computer generated: e.g. a UUID
  • some combination of the two: e.g. a UUID with a deterministic portion.

Which key pattern we choose depends largely on how we plan to access the data.

Deterministic

Let’s say we’re storing a user profile. Assuming no cookies, what are we guaranteed to know about our user after they’ve logged in?

Well, one thing would be their login name.

So, if we want to make life easy for ourselves in retrieving our user profile then we can key it with that person’s login name. Everything else we need to know about that person could be derived from their user profile, in one way or another.

Pretty quickly we’d bump up against a problem: for a user to change their login name we now have to either create a new user profile under a new key or create a look-up document. We could insist that our users can never change their login names but it’s unreasonable to make our users suffer unnecessarily.

We could just decide it’s not that much effort to copy the profile data over to a new document under a new key. Alternatively, we could use something unrelated to the user’s data for our key.

Computer generated

The main downside of a determinstic key is that, usually, it’ll be an element of the data that we’re storing.

If we use something like a UUID our users can update their email address, or whatever else we’re using as a login name, without us having to recreate their profile document under a fresh key.

We can even get Couchbase to do key design for us using a counter.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Someone fills out the new account form and clicks “Submit”.
  2. We increment our counter document and it returns the next number up (e.g. 1001).
  3. We create a new user profile document keyed with 1001.
  4. We then create look-up documents for things such as their login name, enabling us to do a simple look-up on the data we hold at login time.

We also get some side benefits from using this pattern to name our key, such as a counter telling us how many user profiles we’ve created during the application’s lifetime.

Compound keys

It’s when we combine both these methods that we can start to do really interesting things with Couchbase and how we use key names.

We’ve looked before at when to embed data in one large document and when it’s best to refer to other documents. When we choose to refer to data held in separate documents, we can build predictable key names from components that tell us something about what the document holds. With compound keys, we’re looking for naturally occurring patterns.

Let’s look at our user profile again. The main document is stored under the key 1001. We’re working on an ecommerce site so we also want to know all of the orders our customer has made. How do we do it? Simple: we store the list of orders under the key 1001::orders.

Similarly, our system might judge what sort of marketing emails to send to customers based on their total spend with the site. Rather than have the system calculate that afresh each time, we instead do it the NoSQL way: we calculate it once and then store it for later retrieval under the key 1001::orders::value.

Next time

Next time I’ll be looking at how to model data most effectively for use with Couchbase views.

Author

Posted by Matthew Revell, Lead Developer Advocate, EMEA, Couchbase

Matthew Revell is a Lead Dev Advocate, EMEA Couchbase. He developed a global strategy for putting Couchbase front in the minds of the product's developers.

2 Comments

  1. Hi Matthew,

    What approach do you recommend for generating countered keys in a couchbase lite scenario? I\’m planning to use the combination of couchbase lite, sync gateway, and couchbase server.

  2. […] Using semantic prefixes and suffixes in your key names is an easy way to namespace your documents, particularly when you’re using Couchbase for key-value. […]

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