Build database relationships with Node.js and MongoDB

Let’s dive deeper into MongoDB and understand how relationships work between MongoDB collections in a Node.js server application.

Originally published on jscrambler blog.

MongoDB is a NoSQL document-oriented database. It’s popular in the Node.js community and a viable database solution for building real-world applications.

MongoDB is different from traditional, SQL databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL in that data is stored in binary JSON-like objects called BSON). This structure lends itself well to building Javascript applications that communicate with JSON. Additionally, MongoDB has flexible schema. This means there aren’t database migrations to worry about and data models can grow and change.

In this tutorial, we’re going to set up a Node.js server application, connect it to MongoDB and demonstrate how relationships work between MongoDB Collections. In the table below (provided by MongoDB) you’ll see how traditional aspects of SQL databases stack up against their MongoDB equivalents. You can find the whole source code for this tutorial in this GitHub repo.

Source: MongoDB

In SQL databases, we get database relationships using joins. For example, if we had a SQL…