I’m using a php framework with a mongodb adapter that doesn’t currently comprehend embedded documents as a Model/association relationship. After reading about mongodb for a few days it seems that you should use embedded documents for objects that are most often displayed together. This makes a lot of sense to me. It was said during one mongo schema talk that a collection of many small documents can negate some of the advantages of mongo over an RDBMS.
In searching stackoverflow and beyond, I can’t seem to see what advantages exist, if any, when deploying mongodb into an environment where it is implemented with a reasonably normalized schema like you’d find in a traditional RDBMS.
Are there still advantages to using MongoDB when used in this way? Scaling? Performance?
If by “reasonably normalized” you mean that you need information from one table to filter the information from another table (i.e. a join), then mongo is going to work against you. In a SQL database you can easily get the info from multiple tables with a single query. In mongo you’ll need multiple queries to get data from multiple collections. Any speed advantage mongo gives you in pulling from a single collection will quickly be negated by making multiple round trips to the database.