Document structure patterns

Working with Data
1

I am in my first foray into MongoDB. Trying to write an app accessible from PHP web server and in future mobile apps hopefully.

I have been applying what I think are the recommended data modelling patterns from tutorials and webinars, namely to embed documents. I see the benefit in having all data in 1 remote call to the DB (Atlas, in my instance). Is the compromise complexity?

I seem to need to do quite advanced aggregations pipelines to what might seem fairly trivial document updates in the RDBMS world!

I am not sure how to judge where and when to split this data. Is there a typical way to measure this? i.e. no of remote calls, volume / size of documents returned, etc?

To illustrate:

  • Document per round of golf played
  • Inside this document, sub-array of Object per hole played
  • hole object contains lots of properties, i.e hole no, par, stroke index, playerScore and some others

With this structure, to update a single hole’s score, I need to dive into the layered sub-documents. If these were separate collections, wouldn’t a hole document be easier to update?

I have repeated this pattern often now. Or maybe its just the generic steep learning curve of any platform / technology?

Discussion piece, not an actual problem to solve. But peoples insights would be invaluable.