My web development experience started with Rails, Postgres, and SQLite about 16 months ago and starting using Meteor about 10 months ago. In the handful of Rails apps I made, all of my interactions with the database were done through Active Record; I was an abstraction away from any SQL queries. I declared my relationships and got the data I wanted with simple `object.attribute` syntax.

In Mongo, I do the same thing but without an ORM. I declare objects and insert them. If I want relationships between collections I have to declare them myself, but that's just declaring some foreign key fields. I denormalize my data model in some places so I don't have to do that too often, though. And Meteor gives me this interface on the client as well — that along with data reactivity and a pub-sub architecture is a lot of fun to build with.

I've seen a lot of hate for Mongo and I'm not sure why. SQL and NoSQL databases are both capable of doing the same thing, they just have different use cases that they excel at. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRoy6I4gKWU) is the clearest talk I've seen explaining their differences, and having watched that I'm unsure of why people are so rabidly for or against each type of database.