Couchbase Server has a vast and powerful key/value API. There are basic operations to read and write values. There are facilities for easy and quick modification of simple data types. There are also methods used to manage concurrency with locks. You'll even find advanced key/value API methods that allow you to verify persistence and replication. In this chapter, we're going to explore the key/value interface in detail.

In order to examine this API, you'll need to install one of the Couchbase SDKs. While the Couchbase Console provides tools to insert and update documents, it doesn't expose the Couchbase CRUD API to the user in any way. To get a full feel for the Couchbase key/value API, we're going to jump right into using an SDK.