When I first started using MongoDB, I didn’t have a plan beyond “install it and hope for the best.” I had read about how flexible it was, and it felt like all the developers swore by it, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I spun it up, built my first application, and got a feature working. But I felt like something was missing. It felt clunky. My queries were longer than I expected, and performance wasn’t great; I had the sense that I was fighting with the database instead of working with it. Afte...