MongoDB performances $ref vs embedded - node.js

Question

I recently started a project using mongodb and nodejs to build a restful web service. Unfortunately mongodb is very new to me, and coming from the relational databases world I'm asking my self a lot of questions.
Let me explain you my problem :
The goal is to build a sort of content management system with social features like a user can post topics that can be shared and commented.
I have 2 possibilities to do this the one using a reference to get topics posted by a user, the second using topics as embedded document of user instead of reference.
So basically I can have these 2 schemas :
var UserSchema = new Schema({
username: {
type: String,
unique: true,
required: true
},
password: {
type: String,
required: true
},
name: {
type: String
},
first_name: String,
phone: String,
topics: [Topic.schema]
});
var TopicSchema = new Schema({
_creator: {
type: String,
ref: 'User'
},
description: String,
comments: [Comments.schema],
shared_with: [{
type: Schema.ObjectId,
ref: 'User'
}] //[{ type: String, ref: 'User'}]
});
var CommentSchema = new Schema({
_creator: {
type: String,
require: true
},
text: {
type: String,
required: true
},
});
and
var UserSchema = new Schema({
username: {
type: String,
unique: true,
required: true
},
password: {
type: String,
required: true
},
name: {
type: String
},
first_name: String,
phone: String,
topics: [{ type: Schema.ObjectId, ref: 'Topics'}]
});
var TopicSchema = new Schema({
_creator: {
type: String,
ref: 'User'
},
description: String,
comments: [Comments.schema],
shared_with: [{
type: Schema.ObjectId,
ref: 'User'
}] //[{ type: String, ref: 'User'}]
});
var CommentSchema = new Schema({
_creator: {
type: String,
require: true
},
text: {
type: String,
required: true
},
});
So the first schema uses 1 collection of user document and the second use 1 collection for the user and 1 collection for the topics, this implies to make for example, 2 finds queries to retrieve a user and it's topics but it is also easyer to query directly the topics.
Here is the request I use to retrieve a specific topic with some user info with the first schema :
User.aggregate([
{$match: {
"topics._id":{$in:[mongoose.Types.ObjectId('56158c314861d2e60d000003')]}
}},
{ $unwind:"$topics" },
{$match: {
"topics._id":{$in:[mongoose.Types.ObjectId('56158c314861d2e60d000003')]}
}},
{ $group: {
_id: {
_id:"$_id",
name:"$name",
first_name:"$first_name"
},
topics:{ "$push": "$topics"}
}}
]);
So the question is, what do youh think ? Which is the good schema in your opinion ?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Better solution: using a reference to get topics posted by a user
For this database use, one typically needs to consider the MMAPV1 document size limit (16MB). Putting user, topic, and comments in one document allows the document to grow without bound. If each topic is a page of text (1K), then each user could have about 16,000 topics before the limit is reached. That seems huge, but what happens if you decide to put images, videos, sounds in the topic as the product matures? Converting from an embedded to a normalized schema later would be a lot more work than a simple design choice today.
Similarly, if the comments could grow to cause a topic to exceed the 16MB limit, they should be in a separate collection. Unlikely? Probably. But if you are writing something that will become, say, the Huffington Post - check out comments on their popular articles.
Here is mongo's advice on data model design