Within Couchbase Server, the techniques and systems used to get information into and out of the database differ according to the level and volume of data that you want to access. The different methods can be identified according to the base operations of Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete:
Create
Information is stored into the database using the memcached protocol interface to store a document against a specified document ID. Bulk operations for setting the value of a large number of documents at the same time are available, and these are more efficient than multiple smaller requests.
The value stored can be any binary value, including structured and unstructured strings, serialized objects (from the native client language), native binary data (for example, images or audio).
Retrieve
To retrieve, you must know the document ID used to store a particular value, then you can use the memcached protocol (or an appropriate memcached compatible client-library) to retrieve the value stored against a specific document ID. You can also perform bulk operations
Update
To update information in the database, you must use the memcached protocol interface. The memcached protocol includes functions to directly update the entire contents, and also to perform simple operations, such as appending information to the existing record, or incrementing and decrementing integer values.
Delete
To delete information from Couchbase Server you need to use the memcached protocol which includes an explicit delete command to remove a document from the server.
However, Couchbase Server also allows information to be stored in the database with an expiry value. The expiry value states when a document should be automatically deleted from the entire database, and can either be specified as a relative time (for example, in 60 seconds), or absolute time (31st December 2012, 12:00pm).
The methods of creating, updating and retrieving information are critical to the way you work with storing data in Couchbase Server.