Fair question. Obviously that recommendation was supposed to be taken alongside the other recommendations about not touching too many records, so, yeah 'SELECT

Fair question. Obviously that recommendation was supposed to be taken alongside the other recommendations about not touching too many records, so, yeah 'SELECT *' is probably not good. What I meant here is thinking about making your publication queries simpler when designing your data models. For instance, sometimes using denormalization you can use a simple equality selector rather than some more complex mongo selector. Mongo makes it possible to avoid the denormalization, but it might bite you as it means Meteor can't do a bunch of short-circuits that it might otherwise do on a simpler query.