Hello, I am developing a new project with an internal chat between users. Also, there are complex relationships between the other project entities but I wolud like to build something scalable and fast and right now I am designing the data model. What kind of database would you recommend me to manage all application data? relational like MySQL, no relational like MongoDB or a mixed one? Thank you
The most important question is where are you planning to host? On-premise, or in the cloud.
Particularly if you are planning to host in either AWS or Azure, then your first point of call should be the PaaS (Platform as a Service) databases supplied by these vendors, as you will find yourself requiring a lot less effort to support them, much easier Disaster Recovery options, and also, depending on how PAYG the database is that you use, potentially also much cheaper costs than having a dedicated database server.
Your question regards 'Relational or not' is obviously key, and you need to consider both your required data structure, as well as the ACID requirements of your application model, as well as the non-functional requirements in terms of scalability, resilience, whether you want security authorisation at the highest application tier, or right down to 'row' level in the database, etc. - however please don't fall into the trap of considering 'NoSQL' as being single category. MongoDB, with its document-store type solution is a very different model to key-value-pair stores (like AWS DynamoDB), or column stores (like AWS RedShift) or for more complex data relationships, Entity Graph Stores (like AWS Neptune), to stores designed for tokenisation and text search (ElasticSearch) etc.
Also critical in all this is how many items you believe you need to index by. RDBMS/SQL stores are great for having as many indexes as you want, other than the slow-down in write speed, whereas databases like Amazon DynamoDB provide blisteringly fast read/write performance, but are very limited on key indexing capabilities.
It feels like you have most experience with SQL/RDBMS technologies, so for the simplest learning curve, and if your application fits it, then I'd personally start by looking at AWS Aurora https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/ .
In MongoDB, a write operation is atomic on the level of a single document, so it's harder to deal with consistency without transactions.