I will say this can go the other way in the hands of someone who doesn't understand what they are doing. I recently started work at a startup where the codebas

I will say this can go the other way in the hands of someone who doesn't understand what they are doing. I recently started work at a startup where the codebase is running PHP/MYSQL which in itself is ok, but the database was horribly designed. To deal with the tracking of "events" they constantly receive from devices that vary a lot from device to device it uses a linker table for every field that can be stored aside from ID. Considering the data never changes once inserted, it's really seems like overkill. Any meaningful query that goes beyond getting a single datapoint involves dozens of joins which just kills the database. If someone just made him use mongo for the events storage we would probably be in a better position to fix the issues we are dealing with.