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Take facebook's private messaging system where you have to keep track of sender and receiver along w/ the message content. If I were using MySQL I would have multiple tables, but with MongoDB I'll try to avoid all that. I'm trying to come up with a "good" schema that can scale and is easy to maintain. If I were using mysql, I would have a separate table to reference the user and and message. See below ... profiles table user_id first_name last_name message table message_id message_body time_stamp user_message_ref table user_id (FK) message_id (FK) is_sender (boolean) With the schema listed above, I can query for any messages that "Bob" may have regardless if he's the recipient or sender. Now how to turn that into a schema that works with MongoDB. I'm thinking I'll have a separate collection to hold the messages. Problem is, how can I differentiate between the sender and the recipient? If Bob logs in, what do I query against? Depending on whether Bob initiated the email, I don't want to have to query against "sender" and "receiver" just to see if the message belongs to the user. I hit up MongoDB's message group and came away with something that may work. Each message would be treated as a "blog" post. When a message is created, add the two users (doesn't matter who sender/receiver is initially) into an array. Each response after that would be treated as a comment, which would be inserted into an array. MESSAGES { "_id" : <objectID>, "users" : ["bob", "amy"], "user_msgs" : [ { "is_sender" : "bob", "msg_body" : "Hi Amy, how are you?!", "timestamp" : <generated by Mongo> } { "is_sender" : "amy", "msg_body" : "Bob, long time no see, how is the family?!", "

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