Making MongoDB more 'relational' - node.js

Question

I like using MongoDB but can't quite swallow the non-relational aspect of it. As far as I can tell from mongo users and the docs: "It's fine, just duplicate parts of your data".
As I'm worried about scaling, and basically just not remembering to update parts of the code to update the correct parts of the data, it seems like a good trade-off to just do an extra query when my API has to return the data for a user with a summary of posts included:
{
"id": 1,
"name": "Default user",
"posts_summary": [
{
"id": 1,
"name": "I am making a blog post",
"description": "I write about some stuff and there are comments after it",
"tags_count": 3
},
{
"id": 2,
"name": "This is my second post",
"description": "In this one I write some more stuff",
"tags_count": 4
}
]
}
...when the posts data looks like this below:
//db.posts
{
"id": 1,
"owner": 1,
"name": "I am making a blog post",
"description": "I write about some stuff and there are comments after it",
"tags": ["Writing", "Blogs", "Stuff"]
},
{
"id": 2,
"owner": 1,
"name": "This is my second post",
"description": "In this one I write some mores tuff",
"tags": ["Writing", "Blogs", "Stuff", "Whatever"]
}
So behind the API, when the query to get the user succeeds, I am doing an additional query to the posts collection to get the "posts_summary" data I need, and adding it in before the API sends response.
It seems like a good trade-off considering the problems it will solve later. Is this what some mongo users do to get around it not being relational, or have I made a mistake when designing my schema?

Answer 1

You can use schema objects as references to implement relational mapping using mongoose
http://mongoosejs.com/docs/populate.html
using mongoose ur schema would be like:
User:Schema({
_id : Number,
name : String,
owner : String,
Post : [{ type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'Post' }]
});
Post:Schema({
_id : Number,
name : String,
owner : String,
description : String,
tags:[String]
})