MongoDB - Associate Developer Study Guide

4: Data Modeling

This chapter builds the schema-design intuition an application developer needs on top of the document model, BSON typing, CRUD surface, and indexing rules already covered. It moves from the embed-versus-reference choice through cardinality shapes, denormalization trade-offs, the ceilings imposed by the 16 MB per-document size limit and the unbounded-array anti-pattern, the four canonical schema patterns (subset, extended reference, computed, bucket), and finally the process of mapping a stated read/write access pattern to a concrete document shape.