Optimizing Indices In Google Cloud Datastore - How And Why?

19 Nov 2018

You might already know what database indices (or indexes) are from relational databases. Their role is to make queries faster. But it's not obligatory to have them - they are an optional feature.

But with Google Cloud Datastore it's quite the opposite. You can't query the Datastore without indices. They are an integral part of the database.

This is because Datastore is not a relational database, but instead a NoSQL database. It's a document-oriented database and each (searchable) field needs its own index to be successfully queried.

P.S.: If you use Firestore, you might want to see this article: Firestore: How to exempt a field from being indexed

Enough theory, let's take a more practical look into it.


Let's say that we have the following User model:

class User(ndb.Model):
    first_name = ndb.StringProperty()
    last_name = ndb.StringProperty()
    email = ndb.StringProperty()
    phone = ndb.StringProperty()
    description = ndb.TextProperty()
    image_url = ndb.StringProperty()
    active = ndb.BooleanProperty(default=False)

As soon as we start entering users in the Datastore, the database will create indices for almost every attribute in this model. An index for first_name will be created. Then another one for last_name. And the same for email, phone, image_url and active attributes.

Wait, what about the description attribute?

The description attribute is of type TextProperty and Google Datastore does not create indices for this type of attributes. It kind of makes sense, because the TextProperty content usually takes quite a lot of space. The same goes for JsonProperty and some other Datastore types (more about them here).

This also means that we cannot query a user's description in the Datastore. The following query would not work:

users = User.query(User.description == "smart").fetch()

But you can query, for example, a user's first name:

users = User.query(User.first_name == "Matt").fetch()

So Google Datastore makes sure that your database does not grow too much too fast by setting some default restrictions on specific Datastore types.

If you'd still want to have the description field searchable, you should use Google Search API instead. More about this in one of the future posts.

Can I restrict specific indices myself?

Yes! You don't want to have every (unrestricted) Datastore field indexed. For example, you might not want to have the image_url field indexed, because you know you'll never do a query on it.

So this is how you can disable/prevent an index for a certain model attribute:

image_url = ndb.StringProperty(indexed=False)

This will save your Datastore space and keep you longer within the GAE free quota (or at least make you spend less on GAE).

Try to do a query on the image_url field now. As you'll see, the query will not work, which is what you'd want.

Best practice

It's a good practice to have the indexed property set up for every attribute in each of your models, no matter if you set it up as True or False.

Let's do this for our User model:

class User(ndb.Model):
    first_name = ndb.StringProperty(indexed=True)
    last_name = ndb.StringProperty(indexed=True)
    email = ndb.StringProperty(indexed=True)
    phone = ndb.StringProperty(indexed=True)
    description = ndb.TextProperty(indexed=False)
    image_url = ndb.StringProperty(indexed=False)
    active = ndb.BooleanProperty(default=False, indexed=True)

As you can see, I added the indexed property also to the description attribute. I did this because of consistency. It's better to have this property on all your attributes so you can make sure that you didn't forget to add it somewhere.

This approach also requires that you think in advance about which of your model attributes will need queries and which will not.

But also make sure that you don't overthink this and spend too much time on it. Even if you do a mistake and make some field unindexed, but then find out you shouldn't - don't worry! You can undo your mistake pretty easily.

How to index an unindexed attribute

Let's say you've made the phone attribute unindexed (indexed=False), but after some time (when you already have a couple hundred users in your database) you figure out you should have indexed it.

First of all you have to make the change in your model:

phone = ndb.StringProperty(indexed=True)

But be aware that this will not make Datastore create an index for all of the past entries in the database. It will only index the entries that:

  • are newly added to the Datastore (so every new User), or
  • have been updated AFTER you've made this field indexed.

In this situation, you can either leave the things as they are and wait for the old User entries to be updated - this works for example if your users are regularly updating their profiles.

Or if you don't want to wait, you can create a simple for loop which updates every User object in the Datastore:

users = User.query().fetch()

for user in users:

Important: if you have a lot of entries (like more than 5000) in the database, this can take quite some time and it can result in the request timeout. In this case, you'd want to use background workers where each of the workers would update a limited set of user objects.

This is it about the indexed property - I hope it helped you solve some particular problem or gave you an idea on how to optimize your Cloud Datastore! :)

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