Node.js, MongoDB, and AngularJS Web Development

Normalizing Data with Document References

Data normalization is the process of organizing documents and collections to minimize redundancy and dependency. You normalize data by identifying object properties that are subobjects and that should be stored as a separate document in another collection from the object’s document. Typically you do this for objects that have a one-to-many or many-to-many relationship with subobjects.

The advantage of normalizing data is that the database size will be smaller because only a single copy of each object will exist in its own collection instead of duplicated on multiple objects in a single collection. Also, if you modify the information in the subobject frequently, you only need to modify a single instance ...