I have a basic rhetorical or maybe theoretical question.

In making an aggregation pipeline in Mongo, we use $unwind to explode nested array values so each has its own document so that we may group or do other aggregation.

To me this smells just like getting the data to First Normal Form. I have searched and searched and not found that phrase uttered in any Mongo topics, certainly it was not said in courses I took in MongoDB University. And this would apply to other non-relational data systems as well.

Is 1NF essentially the same thing as the data form necessary for an aggregation step?

I have a basic rhetorical/theoretical question for people experienced using both MongoDB and RDBMS. Surprised SO has no Data Munging or Data Engineering forum.

In making an aggregation pipeline in Mongo, we use $unwind to explode nested array values so each has its own document so that we may group or do other aggregation.

To me this smells just like getting the data to First Normal Form. The documents tend to look just like records in 1NF at this stage. It seems like that is the goal. I have searched and searched and not found that phrase uttered in any Mongo topics, certainly it was not said in courses I took in MongoDB University. And this would apply to other non-relational data systems as well.

Is 1NF essentially the same thing as the data form necessary for an aggregation step? Is there any data manipulation term for it?