Maybe my other comment might help clarify: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858939 The bottom level of our

Maybe my other comment might help clarify: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858939 The bottom level of our application layer is a query builder which is almost a drag and drop replacement between mongo and postgres. By the time that layer is built out, we know what our database needs to look like. I find that adding/dropping fields and models in mongo to be drastically faster than moving models around in postgres. The above example would obviously end up in the same structure, whether we started with relational or not. It was nothing more than demonstrating an iterative process where you don't need to START denormalized just because "that's why you use nosql". We try to be as incremental as possible when building our apps, and have found that using nosql allows for 20 small refactors that often end up being 2 larger refactors with a relational db. We've just found that it ends up being a faster production process, and we end up with a much more application-specific database instead of just "This is a Person, this is an Address, this is a Comment". Sure, we know beforehand that the application will contain all those components. We don't necessarily know how they'll be used in a request-by-request basis, and whether or not they will actually end up being one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many.