In this chapter, we explored the Couchbase Server key/value API in detail. You saw that Couchbase supports the basic CRUD operations you'd expect of a database system, whether relational or nonrelational. We examined operations that are unique to Couchbase, for example, append and prepend operations can be used to store data, while increment and decrement operations can be used to modify a key's value.

You learned how Couchbase supports both pessimistic and optimistic locking as well as basic strategies to use both. We explored the ability to use durability checks and asynchronous methods to tweak the performance of our application. Most importantly, we got a taste of a few of the client SDKs and how they perform the various operations.

At this point, we've explored about 98 percent of the Couchbase key/value API. There are a few other legacy methods that you might encounter, depending on your SDK; for example, the flush operation is used to remove all records from a bucket. The key...