There’s been a lot of talk about the Jepsen-Mongo affair on HN lately, but the problem I have with Mongo and NoSQL in general is much more basic - it’s modeling relationships, which always end up appearing in every data model I’ve ever designed.

I’m aware you can keep references from one doc to another but it always ends up being a messy affair even at smallish scales, and it feels as if the cognitive burden of managing these relationships ends up falling on the dev, instead of being managed by the DB.

For those of you using MongoDB in large scale large production apps, is this not a problem? Is your underlying business domain really non-relational, or do you manage to comfortably run highly relational models on a doc-based DB? How?