N1QL (SQL for JSON) Database Query Language

Powerful queries and performance at scale

N1QL gives application developers an expressive, powerful, and complete declarative language with industry standard ANSI joins for querying, transforming, and manipulating JSON data – just like SQL. You can visualize and optimize complex query plans for large datasets and deliver the best performance at any scale to meet the demands of millions of users.

Solve your toughest NoSQL adoption and production challenges

High migration cost

Most other NoSQL databases have limited SQL support, or none at all. This makes the migration of applications very expensive because you must rewrite the data access layer and retrain developers.

Unpredictable performance

Application performance suffers at peak workloads when NoSQL databases lack high-performance query optimizers and indexers that can scale linearly.

Data inconsistencies

When you have limited support of efficient data access, joins, and aggregation, this forces frequent schema and index changes, which leads to data duplication and inconsistencies.

Innovate, iterate, and scale apps faster

Unparalleled technology, from cloud to the edge

N1QL: Get the agility of SQL and the flexibility of JSON

Develop engaging applications with ease using a comprehensive and declarative query language for JSON. Developers can rapidly adapt to changing business requirements using a schemaless JSON document store.

Learn N1QL in 10 minutes

couchbase n1ql scale query optimizer process

Query without compromise, scale without limits

A high-performance query engine with built-in optimizer and indexer enables millions of concurrent interactions with sub-millisecond latencies. Couchbase’s multi-dimensional architecture leverages index partitioning to elastically scale data capacity, delivering accelerated query performance.

N1QL: A practical guide

Visually design your queries with ease

The premium user interface of the Query Workbench allows you to optimize queries by visually profiling the execution plan. Transparent partitioning and automatic replication of the indexes deliver high availability and performance for business-critical applications.

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"Developers simply write a declarative query language and the query engine decides the optimal path, and gives the answers they want."

Keshav Murthy

Senior Director of Research and Development, Couchbase

Related features and capabilities

Global Secondary Indexes (GSI)

Global Secondary Indexes (GSI) is a powerful solution that enables secondary lookup queries for interactive applications that require low latencies.

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Query Workbench

The Query Workbench provides a rich graphical user interface to perform query development. You can conveniently visualize query plans to profile and optimize queries. You can also explore query results and the document structures in a bucket – all in a single window.

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Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS)

Scale out the service you need, when you need it. MDS guarantees the predictable performance of individual services deployed under Couchbase Data Platform by delivering workload isolation of various microservices such as query, full-text search, analytics, and more.

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Full-Text Search (FTS)

Liberate your JSON data with language-aware text searching that enables users to quickly obtain the most relevant documents based on scoring. As part of the Couchbase Data Platform, the FTS service keeps search indexes up to date in real time as documents change.

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Solutions

Session store

Track user statistics like session creation, state tracking, and session security, and scale your query capabilities as user statistics increase.

Catalog and inventory management

Enable operational reporting on inventory and leverage ad hoc queries on product listings, pricing catalogs, user information, and more.

Customer 360

Create a single cohesive view of customers and a consistent user experience using flexible query capabilities that enable quick access to new and changing forms of data from all customer touchpoints.

Identity and access management

Get real-time data on millions of users for online transactions, user authentication, media access permissions to subscription-based content, and more.

"When Couchbase introduced me to N1QL, we quickly realized that N1QL offers the flexibility to search with a language that looks 99 percent the same as SQL. So for all developers, it was an easy transition."

FIDENCIO GARRIDO

Principal Engineer, DIRECTV

DIRECTV, one of the world’s leading providers of digital television entertainment services, runs software to support 38 million customers globally on 3,000 channels. DIRECTV discovered Couchbase’s performance to be unparalleled and leverages N1QL using Node.js.

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38M+

customers

3K+

channels

Because Cvent was already using SQL, they were able to switch to N1QL without missing a beat. With N1QL they gained the ability to define their own data with schemaless data modeling and create their own queries using multiple indexing options. Now, Cvent uses Couchbase across 8 development clusters and 45 teams to develop and run hundreds of microservices.

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8

development clusters

100+

microservices

By applying Couchbase’s N1QL and Full-Text Search (FTS) over machine learning in the Google Cloud, Seenit provides its customers with an incredibly powerful search function that allows them to filter submissions by objects in the video, specific words or phrases in the audio, video and audio quality, sentiment, and many other attributes. N1QL enables Seenit to sort, filter, transform, group, and combine data from multiple JSON documents with a single query.

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After adopting N1QL, eBay doubled its number of Couchbase use cases and increased its number of Couchbase nodes 5x while handling 80 billion Couchbase calls per day.

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80B+

Couchbase calls per day

Nielsen’s Answers on Demand (AOD) service delivers ratings data and other information for businesses in more than 100 countries. Nielsen currently uses Couchbase as a document store and heavily leverages N1QL for big data analytics.

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