I&#39;m new to this whole NOSQL stuff and have recently been intrigued with mongoDB.  I&#39;m creating a new website from scratch and decided to go with MONGODB/NORM (for C#) as my only database.  I&#39;ve been reading up a lot about how to properly design your document model database and I think for the most part I have my design worked out pretty well.  I&#39;m about 6 months into my new site and I&#39;m starting to see issues with data duplication/sync that I need to deal with over and over again.  From what I read, this is expected in the document model, and for performance it makes sense. I.E. you stick embedded objects into your document so it&#39;s fast to read - no joins;    but of course you can&#39;t always embed, so mongodb has this concept of a DbReference which is basically analogous to a foreign key in relational DBs.    

So here&#39;s an example:  I have Users and Events;  both get their own document,  Users attend events, Events have users attendees.  I decided to embed a list of Events with limited data into the User objects.  I embedded a list of Users also into the Event objects as their &quot;attendees&quot;.  The problem here is now I have to keep the Users in sync with the list of Users that is also embedded in the Event object.  As I read it,  this seems to be the preferred approach, and the NOSQL way to do things. Retrieval is fast, but the fall-back is when I update the main User document, I need to also go into the Event objects, possibly find all references to that user and update that as well.

So the question I have is, is this a pretty common problem people need to deal with?  How much does this problem have to happen before you start saying &quot;maybe the NOSQL strategy doesn&#39;t fit what I&#39;m trying to do here&quot;?   When does the performance advantage of not having to do joins turn into a disadvantage because you&#39;re having a hard time keeping data in sync in embedded objects and doing multiple reads to the DB to do so?

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Too much data duplication in mongodb?