JavaScript ubiquity

MongoDB has a master server at each point in time for any given shard. And when you update a key in that shard, you always update the master. In contrast, Riak doesn't force you to funnel all writes to a key through a particular server. Because of this, clients are forced to reconcile the divergent versions of a key that may occur when they do reads. Cassandra is similar.

Note to nitpickers: a lot of these datastores can be configured to run in different consistency modes. For example Riak has last_write_wins, and Cassandra has the ability to do quorum writes, etc. In general, though, if you find yourself obsessing over these settings, you might just be using the wrong datastore for the job. They have different design goals.

To come back to your particular situation, denormalizing the data that you store in MongoDB is a choice that you have made. You could do the same thing with SQL, or any other strongly consistent data store.

On the other hand, you could say that the limtiations MongoDB forced you to go down this path, since it doesn't support SQL-style transactions, foreign keys, and so forth. That's a fair point.