Do NOT use MongoDB unless you understand it and how your data will be queried. Joins like the author mentions by ID is not a bad thing. If you aren't sure how y

Do NOT use MongoDB unless you understand it and how your data will be queried. Joins like the author mentions by ID is not a bad thing. If you aren't sure how you are going to query your data, then go with SQL. With a schemaless store like Mongo, I've found you actually have to think a LOT more about how you will be retrieving your information before you write any code. SQL can save your ass because it is so flexible. You can have a shitty schema and make it work in the short term until you fix the problem. I wrote many interactive social apps (fantasy game apps) on Facebook and it worked incredibly well and this was before MongoDB added a lot of things like the aggregation framework. The speed of development with MongoDB is remarkable. The replica sets are awesome and admin is cake. It sounds like the author chose it without thinking about their data and querying upfront. I can understand the frustration but it wasn't MongoDB's fault. This is a big deal for MongoDB: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-142 https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-142. Let's say you have comments embedded on a document and you want to query a collection for matches based on a filter. If you do that, you'll get all of the embedded comments back for each match and then have to filter on the client. IMO, when the feature above is added, MongoDB will become more usable for more use cases that web developers see.