[matwood]

> As a sidenote local cultural issue, the fact that we can operate the MongoDB servers ourselves, whereas RDBMS instances are with a central team and buried under a layer of bureaucracy was also probably an operational consideration.

This is clearly an oversight in the organization and will get fixed. I don't see it as neutral in the argument for or against some system.

> But where we experienced pain was when the business decided they wanted to do live reporting. We ended up piping the data into a SQL Server instance and using SSRS.

This is common even in RDBMs. You have a database designed to handle the running of whatever application. That design may not be the most efficient for reporting off that application. Flattening the data, and pre-aggregating is usually a good first step. Many data warehouse solutions can do some of this automagically if set up with a common schema type (like star).