The hype is the real issue. Even today, the CTO appears to claim that 90% of apps aren't relational enough to need Mongo. I did a startup in 2011/2012 where we

The hype is the real issue. Even today, the CTO appears to claim that 90% of apps aren't relational enough to need Mongo. I did a startup in 2011/2012 where we bought into the hype and used MongoDB & Node + Mongoose. It was horrific. Your app is relational, full stop. You would know if it wasn't. Do you have users? Do those users need to log in? Well, you now have access tokens related to users. Do those users need to create anything at all? You've now related those owned objects back to the user. We're talking the very basics of any application, and Mongo's support for it is basically nil. We went down the road of embedding relations inside the model (e.g. an "user" has multiple "tickets" to "events"), and then we'd just filter through the "events" table to find the related one. But what if the admin running the event wants a list of all the tickets for his event? We're talking webapp 101 stuff, but we had to write some really gnarly application logic and duplicate a bunch of data to make it fast. It was a complete waste of time. At the crux of this is a fallacy that easier is always better. It's not. There is a reason SQL databases are a little complicated to use - they have evolved over many decades to fit the needs of real applications. MongoDB is only barely removed from writing raw JSON arrays to disk, which is probably the simplest "database" imaginable. When you so callously discard the common wisdom on how to store data, you rediscover why it exists, the slow, hard way. 10gen made a business - and a fortune - out of misleading new developers.