Skills I Was Missing as a MongoDB User

Summary

When I first started using MongoDB, I didn’t have a plan beyond “install it and hope for the best.” I had read about how flexible it was, and it felt like all the developers swore by it, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I spun it up, built my first application, and got a feature working. But I felt like something was missing. It felt clunky. My queries were longer than I expected, and performance wasn’t great; I had the sense that I was fighting with the database instead of working with it. After a few projects like that, I began to wonder if maybe MongoDB wasn’t for me. Looking back now, I can say the problem wasn’t MongoDB, but was somewhere between the keyboard and the chair. It was me. I was carrying over habits from years of working with relational databases, expecting the same rules to apply. If MongoDB’s Skill Badges had existed when I started, I think my learning curve would have been a lot shorter. I had to learn many lessons the hard way, but these new badges cover the skills I had to piece together slowly. Instead of pretending I nailed it from day one, here’s the honest version of how I learned MongoDB, what tripped me up along the way, and how these Skill Badges would have helped. Learning to model the MongoDB way The first thing I got wrong was data modeling. I built my schema like I was still working in SQL– every entity in its own collection, always referencing instead of embedding, and absolutely no data duplication. It felt safe because it was familiar. Then I hit my first complex query. It required data from various collections, and suddenly, I found myself writing a series of queries and stitching them together in my code. It worked, but it was a messy process. When I discovered embedding, it felt like I had found a cheat code. I could put related data together in one single document, query it in one shot, and get better performance. That’s when I made my second mistake. I started embedding everything. At first, it seemed fine. However, my docume...