Best Model for Representing Many to Many relationships with attributes in MongoDB

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In many ways meteor’s API encourages flat relational documents, however MongoDB is a non-relational data store. This conflict is, unfortunately, left as an exercise for the developer to solve.

The notion of schema structure and joins is an enormous topic to cover within a single answer, so I will attempt to be as succinct as possible.

Reasons why you should choose a relational model

Assume you have comment and post data. Consider what would happen if you embedded comments within your posts.

  • DDP operates on documents. All of the comments will be sent every time a new comment in the same post is added.

  • allow and deny rules operate on documents. It may be unreasonable to expect that the same rules apply simultaneously to both posts and comments.

  • Publications tend to make more sense in terms of collections. In the above scenario, we could not easily publish a list of comments independent of their posts.

  • Relational databases exist for good reasons. One of them is to avoid the multiple modification problem inherent in your second solution.

Reasons why you should choose an embedded model

  • Joins are not supported natively by MongoDB, and there isn’t a core package to produce a reactive join.

Recommendations

Use your third solution. In my experience, the reasons for choosing a relational model far outweigh the restrictions imposed by the data store. Of course overcoming the lack of joins isn’t easy, but the pain is likely to be isolated to only a handful of publish functions. Here are some resources I’d highly recommend:

If you need more information beyond this, please comment below and I will update my answer.

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