I am thrilled to announce the availability of the Couchbase Query Workbench (developer preview) with the launch of Couchbase 4.0 GA. Back in June, when we launched Couchbase 4.0 Beta at Connect 2015 in Levi’s Stadium, the most frequent request from customers visiting the N1QL demonstration was for a GUI to create and run N1QL queries. Now that request is answered, and you can download and work with it.
Here is the screenshot of the Query Workbench which exposes three main areas: Metadata, N1QL editor and Query results.
Couchbase 4.0 includes the cbq command-line query tool. While I love command-line tools, graphical user interfaces can provide several advantages, such as easier editing of long, multiline queries, syntax coloring and auto-completion, and flexible, interactive output presentation, including raw JSON, tabular, and tree-based formats, and saving JSON results to files.
The Couchbase Query Workbench also includes an advanced feature not yet available in cbq: the describe command. Describe samples the documents in a bucket to create a description of common document structure(s), i.e., a schema or set of schemas for the documents in a bucket. This can give people a better understanding of the various fields, to help them write better queries, and also highlight differences in document structure that might indicate data cleanliness issues. This describe command may be issued as a query (e.g., “describe beer-sample limit 500”), and it is used behind the scenes to support the metadata explorer panel on the left side of the GUI.
The Query Workbench is a separately downloadable standalone tool that serves up the GUI in your web browser, and gets results from your existing query nodes on your Couchbase installation. It works with Couchbase 4.0 GA or later (but not 4.0 Beta).
Please give the Query Workbench Developer Preview a try it out and give me your feedback!
You can download it here:
Documentation is available here.
Please let me know if you have questions or comments!
