How are relationships maintained in MongoDB?

There are two ways relationship between documents can be maintained in MongoDB.

References - References store the links or references from one document to the other. Data in this form is normalized data.

Embedded documents – MongoDB documents can embed documents within fields or within array elements. This enables related documents to be captured in a single document. Data in this form is renormalized data.

How do you model One-to-One relationship in MongoDB?

You can model One-to-One relationships between documents in MongoDB by either referencing documents or by embedding documents. In general, for One-to-One relationships, if you query the documents frequently then embedding documents is more efficient then referencing documents.

How do you model One-to-Many relationship in MongoDB?

You can model One-to-Many relationships between documents in MongoDB by either referencing documents or by embedding documents. If the data on 'many' side of the relationship is not repetitive and it has to be queried frequently then embedding the data is more efficient. But if data 'many' side of the relationship is repetitive then referencing data may be more efficient.

What are the different ways to model tree structures with MongoDB?

You can model tree structures with MongoDB following ways.

Model with parent references - In this model the tree structure is maintained by storing references to parent node in the children node. The reference to parent node is stored in a field called ‘parent’ within the child document.

Model with child references - In this model the tree structure is maintained by storing references to child nodes in the parent node. The child node references are stored in the parent node in a field called ‘children’ which is of type array.

Model with an array of ancestors - In this model each node maintains references to its ancestors in an array filed called ‘ancestors’. In addition each node maintains a reference to its immediate parent node in a field called ‘parent’.

Model with materialized paths - In this model the tree structure is maintained by storing full relationship paths between documents. Each node maintains as a string its ancestors or the path. The path is stored in the field named ‘path’ in each node document.

Model with nested sets - Model with nested sets: In this model the tree structure is maintained by capturing the stop numbers of each node in a round-trip traversal of the tree. Each node has two stop numbers – first stop number for the initial trip and second stop number for the return trip. Each node stores its first stop in a field called ‘left’ and the second stop in a field called ‘right’. In addition each node stores its immediate parent in a field called ‘parent’.