My top 5 tips for modelling your data to scale

OP, in contrast, basically advocates getting rid of joins and such to avoid network overhead. He's not wrong in his own context, i.e. a Document store with no locking. It just contrasts, to me, with the more conventional tip you hear in SQL land.

Note that OP mentions difficult problems arising around 1-tps due to the lack of locking. The reference I linked to was advice on how to deal with throughput that is four orders of magnitude higher in SQL Server. The gist of it is that, at higher transactions per second rates, disk IO and CPU tend to become blocking earlier than network access. Normalizing more helps in that context.