Comparison of putting author inside blogpost vs blogpost inside author

mongodb-embedding.md

1. Embedding BlogPosts inside Author:

AuthorSchema = { blogposts: BlogPost[] }

✔ Pros:

• Easy to query for all/specific authors.
• Easy to update an author or delete him (including his blogposts) with a single command.
• No matter the number of authors you have, it won't impact on the query speed.
• Retrieve the author and all of his blogposts using a single command.

❌ Cons:

• Difficulty querying/filtering for certain blogposts since they're embedded inside another document (nested).
• Whenever we want to get the posts, we'd have to get the authors too, even though we're not requiring them.
• Since so many blogposts will be created, blogposts field will grow larger and eventually reach Mongodb document max size (16mb).
• Not possible to implement pagination on blogposts.

2. Embedding Author inside Blogposts :

BlogPostSchema = { author: Author }

✔ Pros:

• Retrieve all blogposts using a single command.
• Query Efficiency: Easy to filter for blogposts.
• Storage Efficiency: We could create as many blogposts as we want (without hitting document max size limit).
• Easily implement pagination on blogposts.

❌ Cons:

• Data Redundancy: Authors would be repeated across multiple blogposts, if they have multiple blogposts.
• To update/delete a single author, we'd have to update/delete all of his instances through all of his blogposts.
• Not possible to implement pagination on authors.