I like the idea of Mongo and have read about it but my relational mind can not be unwrapped. Maybe I am trying to complicate things too much. In that example if you have multiple people attending one event and you want to update the event name, do you have to go through all the people and all their events and update each one? Seems like that would be a lot of work, unless there is a way to query for that type of thing? And if there is a query, is it efficient? Seems like behind the scenes mongo would just be iterating through the users, but I'm sure there is more to it than that.
In this case, the events in the user document are events that the user is HOSTING.
There would be another object in our data model to represent the people that got invites to the event. These 'recipients' could be another collection or a list embedded inside each event object.
So then similarly if I wanted to see all the events that I was invited to would I have to loop through all users, all their events, and all of their invitees to see if I was one?
You're going to a depth that is testing the limits of my example :) You wouldn't have to do that. You can have deep indexes, and query on those attributes. So if events had invites embedded, and invites all had email addresses for their recipients:
and that would return all the users that had invited you to an event.
Now, like I said you're testing my example. When these kinds of requirements are taken into account, you'd probably want to have a separate collection for events. Then you could do:
