I see so reference data that you want included in an object for which you're willing to pay the performance overhead of a join rather than denormalize across many object representions in your database. This model has some downsides when it comes to reasoning about scale and denormalization isn't necessarily a consistency quagmire when you can use transactions to keep multiple objects in sync. More generally you can absolutely do this types of queries in modern data systems whether or not they are "relational".