Indexing Metadata Information

  • Capella Operational
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    Couchbase Capella allows indexing on selected metadata fields, for example the expiration and CAS properties. This improves performance of queries involving predicates on the metadata fields, such as expired documents or recently modified documents.

    Overview

    The META() function enables you to return the metadata for a keyspace or document. To index a selected metadata field, you must use a nested expression containing the META() function and the required property, for example META().id.

    The property name must be separated from the META() function by a dot (.) and only the following metadata properties can be indexed. If you attempt to build an index on a metadata field that is not indexable, an error is returned.

    cas

    Value representing the current state of an item which changes every time the item is modified. For details, refer to Concurrent Document Mutations.

    expiration

    Value representing a document’s expiration date. A value of 0 (zero) means no expiration date. For details, refer to KV Operations.

    Note that this property gives correct results only when used in a Covered Index.

    id

    Value representing a document’s unique ID number.

    The META() function does not require a keyspace parameter when creating an index, since it implicitly uses the keyspace being indexed.

    Examples

    To try the examples in this section, set the query context to the inventory scope in the travel sample dataset. For more information, see Query Context.

    Example 1. Find two documents that have no expiration date
    Index
    CREATE INDEX idx_airline_expire ON airline (META().expiration);
    Query
    SELECT META().id, META().expiration
    FROM airline
    WHERE META().expiration = 0
    ORDER BY META().id
    LIMIT 2;
    Results
    [
      {
        "expiration": 0,
        "id": "airline_10"
      },
      {
        "expiration": 0,
        "id": "airline_10123"
      }
    ]
    Example 2. Find all documents whose meta ID tag starts with a letter higher than "g"
    Index
    CREATE INDEX idx_hotel_id ON hotel (META().id);
    Query
    SELECT name, META().id
    FROM hotel
    WHERE META().id > "g"
    LIMIT 2;
    Results
    [
      {
        "id": "hotel_10025",
        "name": "Medway Youth Hostel"
      },
      {
        "id": "hotel_10026",
        "name": "The Balmoral Guesthouse"
      }
    ]
    Example 3. Find the two most recently modified hotel documents
    Index
    CREATE INDEX idx_hotel_cas ON hotel (META().cas);
    Query
    SELECT name, META().cas
    FROM hotel
    ORDER BY META().cas DESC
    LIMIT 2;
    Results
    [
      {
        "cas": 1612962459766947800,
        "name": "The George Hotel"
      },
      {
        "cas": 1612962459645378600,
        "name": "Texas Spring"
      }
    ]